Flying Swarm Projects
Lecturer:
- Christoph Steup
Language:
The course will be held in English.
Participants:
All students of bachelor and master curriculums of the faculty are eligable to visit the course. The course can be taken as Digital Engineering Project, Inter-Disciplinary Project or Team-Project. The actual type of course depends on the needs of the students and the available Topics. It is mandatory for a participant to have background knowledge in at least one of the following topics:
- Robotics
- Programming in C/C++ or Python
- Theorie and Algorithms of Swarm Intellligence
- Communications and Networks
- Development of Embedded Applications in C
- Robot Operating System (ROS)
First Meeting:
The first meeting will be used to organize the project. We will describe the available tasks, the used system and group the interested students. The date of the Kickoff-Meeting is the 04 of April at 13:00 in G29-035. If you want to participate, this meeting is mandatory.
There will be a second Kickoff-Meeting on 11.04.18 at 13:00 in G29-035. Students need to attend only one of the two KickOff Meetings.
Organization:
The course will be taken in groups of 3-4 Students per topic. The students and the groups will be chosen by us depending on your background. The individual topics are not fully fixed, extensions and modifications are possible depending on the skills and interest of participating students. This will be discussed in the first meeting. The result of each project is a working demonstration with commented source code and a written documentation indicating the general concept and a How to to start the demo.
Hardware:
The flying robots are described on the SwarmLab webpage. We use Paparazzi to control the copters and ROS for pretty much everything else.
Alternatively, the rolling swarm platform is used for some Topics. They are also described on the SwarmLab webpage.
Available Topics:
3D Magnetic Mapping
The goal of this topic is to use the existing magnetometer sensors on-board the copter to create a 3D map of magnetic fields in a indoor environment. To this end, the usability of the sensors need to be tested. After the creation of the map, the map will either be used for localization or to compensate for the parasitic indoor magnetic fields to enable a reliable heading estimation of the copters.
Implementation of a autonomous robotic game: "Get the ball"
We have a newly acquired NAO robot, which should participate in autonomous robotic game with our rolling swarm member robots: the Spheros. The goal is to enable the NAO to detect and follow the spheros and finally catch up to them, while they are avoiding him.
Inference of local swarm behaviour rules based on globally controlled copter swarms
Currently, two types of swarm behaviours are considered in the SwarmLab. On the one hand, swarm behavior is used, which uses a global information source like (virtual) GPS coordinates. On the other hand, local swarm behaviors are achieved, which only use information a copter can aquire on its own or using its neighbors. The aim of this project is to try to find mechanisms to automatically deduce local swarm behavior rules based on the observed behavior the copters using global information sources.