Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Rover — A LEGO self driving car – Martin Wojtczyk”.
My name is martin vojcik, i’m here with my wonderful wife, davey and with with our little rover an interactive gesture, controlled mobile route. That is um i want to. I want to give a short introduction about robotics and then come to rover and how it is actually a self-driving car. So most of us know robotics from industrial manufacturing, basically dump robot arms that are just doing repetitive, the same repetitively, the same tasks. Then during my during my phd thesis, i worked on autonomous mobile lab robot.
You can see you can see that mobile that mobile robot was driving through the lab, taking samples uh going around to a microscope, counting cells there diluting the samples – and it was a very expensive, very expensive platform – half a million dollar and we developed a lot of Software, for which is now not accessible to the public. Unfortunately, because this is a very expensive platform and was half a million dollar, i think, and so the goal, how the goal of rover and how rover came to be was basically to use all the advanced robotics. Algorithms, out of a research lab and put it in cheap, off-the-shelf hardware yeah and what we, what we can see here now on display is basically a laptop on wheels the wheels the wheels as as a mobile lego mindstorm set. I can here we here. We see the lego mindstorms controller on the bottom and then under this cloth is a camera which i will put to use very and i’m going back to my slides. So can everybody hear me? Okay, all right, yeah, okay, and so the goal of this project was to bring advanced, robotics algorithms into into everybody’s home and to make it accessible to everybody who can afford a lego, mindstorm set and everybody who has a laptop at home and what makes a robot Smart or what do you need for a self-driving car? A robot actually needs to be able to localize itself within an unknown environment. That is what google does with the self-driving cars. They have gps sensors, they have leaders, they have laser range finders and they take all the data collected and then um and then put filter it into into into a motion vector to go left to go right to go forward or to break, and that is the Same that we’re doing on on this mobile platform um so over here on this play, i’m just showing how the robot is using a depth sensor to get to get mapping.
Information of this is our apartment at home, and then it creates a map of its environment and the robot is able to localize itself in that environment, yeah and and then so. Basically, the robot knows right now, i’m in the right now, i’m in the bedroom. It’S sunday morning and i wanted coffee, i tell the robot, please get me a coffee and the robot knows where it is. It is in the living room or in the bedroom, and it knows, and it can plan based on the map, a collision, free path to the kitchen to the coffee maker and when it has arms that can actually get you a coffee too so and um. Now i would like to give a short demo of the interactivity and what the robot does, and i think we everybody will actually be able to see it. Just like that.
Do we have do we have audio on the okay? So so this is a simple interactive user interface, and when i, when i remove the napkin from from the robot’s camera, it will recognize me in front of the in front of the robot. It will wake up open its eyes and it will greet me hopefully, let’s see if everything works out, so i’m removing the napkin and – and i hope you can see the display – um okay, never mind so um. So the robot said hello: it opened its eyes and greeted me and then just for fun interaction purposes.
We implemented some simple gestures, so you can so you can make the robots happy or sad. You showed that thumbs down gesture and it’s a sad robot. You showed that the stock wrote the gesture and it’s a happy road.
Oh hello, let’s go uh-huh well, kids in particular have a lot of fun with that at our stand. Okay, let’s be happy again. The robot can also tell jokes if you show it high five. I will totally high five you.
If i hit arms, i would totally high five you at arms and so on. It goes and okay now i would like bring it over okay and hi okay. Now i would like to try to get this on display. So what the hello these these are these these are the two. These are the two camera views. We we basically have one. I am rover, we have a simple. We have a simple rgb sensor which, with which we can do face, detection and and figure out. If somebody is looking at the camera and then there is also a depth sensor, which you might be able to see, which gives me distance information, it depends. Does the robot have arms, okay, and i think i unplug now because it will just go um so so so what i wanted to to demonstrate is actually that you can build a robot which is capable of localizing itself in a in a novel, unknown environment.
And you can do that based on really cheap hardware, just like a legal mindstorm set and a 3d camera, and and you can have fun with it – you can program some interactive gestures to for kids to play with it and the robot can go autonomously. I think it will be. I think it would be tough on this on the surface here, because the wheels are not that big, but i can show a short video of what it looks like for the robot. So here on here on display, we will see how the robot drives through our apartment and how the robot will see it through its 3d camera to avoid to avoid obstacles here.
It notices, there’s, there’s something in the way and it will turn away. There is a bookshelf, and this is really how the robot perceives its 3d environment. Basically, it’s all distance information that the robot can see and then based on based on algorithms. You can create a map of its environment that the robot can understand, and then okay and then what we had in mind for maker faire is: if you want to build your own robot, we give away the open source instructions if you visit our website robotics.com.
I just show the browser window quickly and we’ll look at. It will look something like this rover at maker faire and there is a link which you can where you can take a short one page serving it really just or and and if you leave your email address at the bottom, we will send you the lego, digital Designer files, and then you will get okay. This is the levitt displays. Then you will get basically the lego cap model of how to build your own rover and yeah.
That was that was basically it. Thank you for your attention. You .