GPA group is investigating on a conceptual architecture that is being ported to robots endowed with heterogeneous hardware and tasks repertoire.

BOSS-IAI robot has been fully designed and built at the Institute. Its sensor equipment is a camera on a 2dof pan/tilt unit, a rotating sonar on a 1dof step motor and two motor encoders. One standard CPU under linux OS and several microcontroller cards give it processing power. It has one motor for the left pair of wheels and another one for the wheels on the right side, which make it moving in a caterpillar fashion. Designed for indoor office-like environments it can perform visual tracking of dynamic objects, and relative navigation tasks.
 
 

Hermes RWI's B21 is a commercial robot, that was provided with encoders, a compass, sonar, infrared and bumper belts. Its activity is supported by two standard CPUs under linux OS. A CCD camera has been added for providing visual stimuli to the ultrasonic images. As actuators it has two motors for drive and steer movements of the body and two more for the head/neck as well as a speach generator.
Well suited for office and service environments it may perform safe navigational tasks as goto_point for mail delivery and map_building.

A commercial lawnmower, namely ROJO, has been transformed in a prototype to test semi-autonomous outdoor navigation strategies. The basic motion, turn and advance, is performed by means of two electropneumatic actuators that act on the steering and driving axles. It is equipped with a GPS, an inertial odometer, inclinometers, compass and a laser range finder. The on board computer communicates with the IAI-CSIC Intranet nodes by means of a Radio_Ethernet link.

The aim is directed to the semi-autonomous accomplishment of gardening or agriculture tasks, as are grass cutting or pesticides spraying, based on a distributed architecture of Behavioural Agents already demonstrated for indoor office robots navigation..
 

Download ROJO mpeg video files!!!

The new adquisition is the agriculture commercial hydraulic tractor, named DEDALO. Autonomous control is being integrated based upon potentiometric sensors couled to the cylinders to drive and steer.

The same perceptual equipment is been integrated . The main tasks to be performed is the autonomous spraying of pesticides of oranges or olives trees.
 

Last update 2001-04-04