Robot Operating System (ROS)

Waiterbot

For half a semester, I and four other engineering students worked together on a project to build an autonomous food delivery robot that navigates a restaurant-like environment. In this project, I was in charge of the robot's localization using Apriltags and software to control the robot's four bar module. Relevant skills used in this project are:

ROS2 Humble with a modular and elegant system design
Apriltags and camera setup
Robot state localization
Serial communication between ROS2 and a microcontroller

A simple run through of my work is shown below.

For more detailed technical information, check here.

Source code: https://github.com/itannermahncke/pie_waiterbot

Project website: https://olincollege.github.io/pie-2024-03/waiterbot/

Localization

To localize the robot, I used apriltags to determine where the robot is with regards to the apriltag. Because we know where the Apriltag is in the world, we simply use a few transformations to get the robot's position in the world frame.

Fourbar Control

We split the fourbar system into four statuses. By doing this, we can specifically tell Walter that it shouldn’t move when the four-bar module status is at 1 and 2. Furthermore, we can publicly publish to all other nodes so that other nodes will know to set the next location when the four-bar module status is at 3.

Photo of our robot!