Development of Ground Robot Validation Methods and Studies in Operator and Terrain Variability for NIST Test Methods
Open Access
Author:
Crimboli, Adam A
Area of Honors:
Mechanical Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Dr. Sean N Brennan, Thesis Supervisor Karl Martin Reichard, Thesis Supervisor Dr. Sean N Brennan, Thesis Honors Advisor Dr. Hosam Kadry Fathy, Faculty Reader
In critical emergency situations such as bomb disposal the operational characteristics of emergency response robots must be well understood to optimally predict behavior. Standardized testing allows the development of statistics to quantify robot performance. This thesis presents improvements made to a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ground robot testing method and a previous student effort in this area.
During a test, overhead cameras capture images, and computer algorithms are employed for further processing. Fiducial tracking algorithms calculate a robot’s position, speed, and lap progress. Improvements developed in this work include improved camera calibration and refinement of the fiducial tracking system, as well as the addition of a most common path processing algorithm. In addition, this thesis presents the addition of robot power consumption information to the test method. Lastly, robot testing explores applications for employment in operator and terrain variability studies.
