Difference between revisions of "First Level Course Projects"

In order to speed up the development and the maintenance of embedded applications, a way to update the firmware on a microcontroller without the need of connecting cables or programmers can be very handy. We are developing a framework for rapid prototyping of low-cost robots, with smart devices that exchange data on a CAN bus network. The CAN bus bootloader is one of the components we need for this project, enabling remote firmware upgrades of all the devices connected to the CAN network.

This project aims to develop a CAN bus bootloader for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, and eventually for other architectures.

When developing embedded applications it is frequently needed to look at *hardware register content* in order to *debug the code*. All commercial development suites offer register views that show their contents as well as the meaning of each bit. Open source development solutions currently lack this feature, meaning that you have to look to the correct memory location and map the content to the corresponding register bits manually. This seems to be one of the most limiting issues when developing embedded application using open source solutions.

This project aims to fill this gap, developing an Eclipse plug-in that shows the register contents in a tree viewer, like most commercial suites do.

• implementing embedded algorithms for the estimation of the IMU attitude to be compared with the actual one (e.g., Kalman filter, DCM, Madgwick, etc.)
• developing a, easy to use, procedure for the calibration of IMU parameters
• making a comparison with commercial units using a robot arm as testbed
• validate the accuracy of the IMU on a flying platform
• integrate the measurements from a GPS to reduce drift and provide accurate positiong (this will make it definitely a MS thesis)

Material

• electronic board and eclipse based C development toolkit for ARM processors
• papers describing the algorithms we are interested in implementing

Expected outcome:

• few different AHRS algorithms with comparative results
• user-friendly procedure to calibrate the IMU
• a sistem which integrated IMU and GPS to provide accurate positioning

Required skills or skills to be acquired:

• C programming on ARM microcontroller
• background on kalman filtering and attitude estimation

When developing embedded applications it is common the need to test some algorithm in some fast way, without to re-program the whole firmware every time. PAWN (http://www.compuphase.com/pawn/) is a *simple and lightweight scripting language with a C-like syntax*. Execution speed, stability, simplicity and a small footprint were essential design criteria for both the language and the abstract machine, making PAWN suitable for embedded applications.

This project aims to port the abstract machine to ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, add a set of functions to interface with the underlying hardware peripherals and then to embed it as ChibiOS/RT (http://www.chibios.org) thread.

• Implementation of mechanical and electronical parts of the robots for the management of the ball and kicking
• Design of robot behaviors (fuzzy systems)
• Coordination of robots
• New sensors

These projects allow to experiment with real mobile robots. Participation to the championships is a unique experience (2000 people, with 800 robots playing all sort of games...)

The project can be turned into a thesis by facing different problems in depth.

• BIOINSPIRED ROBOT HEAD FOR VISION - design and build a robot head able to host 2 cameras with 2dof of freedom each to create a human-like vision system. The movements can be obtained using 4 McKibben actuators for each camera, or electric actuators.
• NEW HARDWARE FOR MAXIMUMOne - the humanoid robot is moved by more than 20 actuators and needs input from all of them. The new architecture FPGA based will move the arm and the head.
• SIMULATOR OF HUMANOID ROBOT - complete the simulator of MaximumOne with all the dof. The simulator will use the same Matlab algorithms of the controller.
• INTEGRATING MANIPULATION AND VISION ON MAXIMUMOne - develop a natural vision system that uses the neck and the eyes movements to follow objects and to concentrate on grasping targets. The integration can be done in matlab/Simulink and integrated in the MaximumOne model.
• PATH PLANNING AND COLLISION AVOIDANCE IN OOPS - Randomized path planning is a strategy to produce paths for complex devices. An open source project (OOPS) is available; the project is about integrating path planning with a robot simulator.

All the projects can be turned into a thesis.

• KINEMATIC/DYNAMIC MODEL OF WARUGADAR - develop a complete kinematic analysis of a quadruped robot, useful for planning the foot position on uneven terrains. The dynamic model will be useful for learning different gaits.
• GAIT GENERATION AND CONTROL FOR WARUGADAR - Study Central Pattern Generation, develop a CPG implementation in Matlab or Python. Adapt the method to a quadruped robot (Warugadar).
• ROBO FISH - Continue the development of hardware and software for the robotic fish Zoidberg2, and study a fish colony.
• EMBOT WALKING - complete the robot with 4 wheels used as feet. Control it and experiment.
• ROBOTIC EXPERIMENTS WITH BIOLOID - using Bioloid experiments hw and gaits, develop software for the humanoid challenges at ICRA2010.

All the projects can be turned into a thesis.