David Obdrzalek

A controller for autonomous landing of AR.Drone

In recent years, many so called “robotic toys” appeared at the market. Though these devices are called toys and they are primarily intended for games, they provide a set of sensors and actuators that can be controlled from a computer. Hence these robotic devices may serve as non-expensive research tools, in particular for developing advanced software for controlling them. This paper describes a controller for landing of an AR.Drone, a quadricopter marketed by Parrot Inc. This controller is designed for fully autonomous landing to a given visual pattern and for hovering above the pattern. We will show how to collect input information for the controller and how to use it in a classical PID controller.

Software-Hardware Mapping in a Robot Design

In this paper we present a way how to change the design of a small robot for Eurobot contest from a design with a lot of hardcoded, hard to maintain and hard to extend functionality to a more universal design with much better maintainability and upgradability by use of software-hardware mapping. In the process, we show how the change of communication topology and software design rework helped to achieve the goal.

Interprocess Communication in the T4 System

T4 is a microkernel and a distributed operating system built upon it. This paper describes the concepts, goals, and major design features of the T4 system. It provides an overview of the T4 system architecture, communication principles, and support for distributed computation.

Workshop on Robot Competitions.

Robot competitions are more and more used as a tool for education as well as an entertainment activity. This workshop brings together organizers, participants, teachers, and other people interested to share best practices, discuss issues and possibly improve their work.

Robotic event extension experience

In this paper we present our experiences from extending the Eurobot contest for students of the age up to 30 by a category for pupils up to 18. We show two different models of the extension and present our experiences acquired after implementing them in 2008 and 2009.

Usage of real-world robotics in Semantic Web

In automated information retrieval and processing, many different methods are used. In our work we suggest algorithms and procedures which are generally used in real-world robotics might be also useful in virtual information worlds - namely in the Semantic Web. Such real-world methods address navigation, localization and mapping problems, but so far we have not seen similar methods being used in information processing. Based on the data robots acquire using their sensors, they can build their ldquoworld maprdquo, determine their position in a map, or even both at the same time. Our aim is to examine some major methods which help the real robots to successfully do their work in real word and look for parallels which could be used for virtual robots or agents in a virtual world, for example within the hyperlinked documents in the world wide web or in data and metadata used in the Semantic Web.

GFE --- Graphical Finite State Machine Editor for Parallel Execution

In this paper we present GFE --- the Graphical FSM (Finite State Machine) Editor based on the Grafcet SFC (Sequential Function Chart) model. The GFE takes advantage of automated code generation and provides strong tools for complex control. At the same time it gives a high-level overview of the entire robotic control architecture. A complex control system may be designed, tested and deployed using visual approach. This is particularly useful for education where the students do not have to start always from scratch, or for young robot builders who are not as experienced in low-level programming. Once a control library is implemented for a particular robot, it may be reused and the robot may be programmed using solely graphical approach, because the most complicated part of controller design - the state machine - is automatically generated. This avoids typing errors and allows fast and simple redesign.