Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Computer Engineering
Session: 3
Room: Exhibit Hall A
Samantha-Michelle Kanyi - University of Missouri-St. Louis
Co-Author(s): Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
The Kuri robot, a mobile, Alexa-adjacent home companion, was officially discontinued by Mayfield Robotics in 2018. As a result, all Mayfield-developed software and servers accompanying Kuri robots were withdrawn, rendering each robot dysfunctional. This project sought to explore and redevelop a framework for communicating with the Kuri, primarily using rosbridge, Javascript and HTML5. In doing so, we investigated the methods involved in converting data from the Kuri?s world frame to the two-dimensional frame of our Graphical User Interface (GUI). Numerical data was collected using rosbridge publishers and subscribers. In our rosbridge code, we created subscribers to the odometry and laser-scan topics of the robot, written in JSON format. The backend also included a rosbridge publisher to the robot?s mobile-base topic, thus allowing the GUI to control its wheels. Numerical data was translated into graphical data with a two-dimensional, HTML5 Canvas marker, created to track and represent the robot as it moved. Three-by-three transformation matrices were constructed to evaluate the odometry and laser-scan ranges of the robot in motion. These matrices were multiplied by the position points of the marker, to determine the marker’s new position once the actual robot moved. The Javascript code included quaternion-to-euler and cartesian-to-polar conversions, navigating between the dimensions of the marker and the robot. Rosbridge websockets were launched via Linux command-line terminals to connect the robot to the computer running this code. Preliminary results show that our GUI successfully allowed for basic user interaction with the robot. Whenever a joystick moved the robot, the marker also moved on the canvas, generally in the direction of the robot’s motion; the shape of marker also remained intact throughout the motion. This confirmed that the resultant matrices deduced were tracking the robot?s odometry position, and that our unit conversions had appropriately scaled the movement of the robot to the frame of the canvas. However, in testing the driving features of our GUI, there were occasional discrepancies between the rotation of the marker and that of the robot. We hypothesized that this was due to the range restrictions of inverse sine and inverse cosine, which had been used in evaluating the quaternions. Further research will address the discrepancy by formulating an alternative method for navigating between the world-frames of the robot and the marker, instead of with inverse trigonometry. References: Crick, C., Jay, G., Osentosiki S., Pitzer, B., & Jenkins, O. (2011). Rosbridge: ROS for Non-ROS Users. Retrieved from http://www.isrr-2011.org/ISRR-2011/Program_files/Papers/Jenkins-ISRR-2011.pdf Ackerman, E. 2018. ?Mayfield Robotics Cancels Kuri Social Home Robot.? Retrieved from http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/mayfield-robotics-cancels-kuri-social-home-robot?utm_source=robots.ieee.org
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This project was supported in part by the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program, a joint project of the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), which is funded in part by the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program (NSF BPC-A #1246649).
Faculty Advisor: E. Paulette Isaac-Savage, episaac@umsl.edu
Role: My responsibilities included, but were not limited to: Programming a Kuri robot using rosbridge, Javascript, and HTML5, Constructing a two-dimensional visualization of the Kuri in its world-frame using HTML5 and CSS, Creating and computing multiple transformation matrices, Computing quaternion-to-euler and polar-to-cartesian conversions, Troubleshooting the GUI and debugging the rosbridge code whenever a handshake with the robot could not be secured