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GATHER MATERIALS AND BUILD A SHELTER ON MARS
Robots today have been used successfully in many
domains, from exploring Mars and finding evidence of
water, to mapping the health of coral reefs, to
assisting long-distance drivers, to assembling cars.
In our course we will pursue a Grand Challenge approach
to robotics and create new robot bodies and brains. We
are motivated by tasks at the frontier of today's
robotic capabilities. We will develop solutions for
these tasks that are grounded in state-of-the-art
algorithms and systems science for robots. We will
implement these solutions and test them using a
challenge format.
Our robots will employ sophisticated techniques for
perception, navigation, and manipulation to cope with
unknown environments, negotiating intricate paths,
adapting their next move to obstacles, finding useful
objects in the environment, and using them to build a
structure. This work will provide our students with the
foundations for creating computer systems that interact
with the physical world, leading the way from PCs to PRs
(personal robots).
The grand challenge for this course is to Gather
Materials and Build a Shelter on Mars. Imagine a
robot delivered to an uncertain location in a remote and
unknown environment such as the surface of Mars, and
given an uncertain prior map of the local terrain.
Imagine further that construction materials, in the form
of distinctively colored blocks in a few discrete sizes,
have been similarly delivered and are scattered around
the landscape. Some blocks have ended up where intended
(i.e., in known locations), whereas others have ended up
in unknown locations or may have been lost or
destroyed.
Your goal is to design and implement a robot (both its
body and its code) that can move about within its new
domain, collect blocks, transport them (all at once, in
small batches, or even one at a time) to some
autonomously-determined construction location, and
assemble them into a primitive shelter. The shelter may
range from a simple low wall, to a multi-level (stacked)
wall, to an "L" or "V" shape, to a room-like
structure.
One or more of elements needed to solve the Challenge
arise in many other robotic mobile manipulation
applications, ranging from autonomous navigation with
dynamic obstacles, coordinated manufacturing, searching
for and rescuing victims at a disaster area, tidying up
a room, clearing the dishes in a cafeteria, delivering
packages in an office environment, and fetching items
from a stockroom or mailroom.
CAD models of the arm and claw can be found here: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.141/spring2012/pub/labs/CAD & here: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.141/static/pub/labs/CAD
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