Software for a Service Robot

• Autor(a) principal: Correia, André Rosa de Sousa Porfírio
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/10808
• topic: Classificação; Deteção; Inteligência Artificial; Qualidade de Software; Robótica; Segmentação Semântica; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

Service robots are becoming more commonplace every year due to advances in artificial intelligence, substituting humans in increasingly more complex tasks. By having an autonomous and competent service robot performing routinely tasks instead of its human owners, their productivity increases. The search for better service robots has led to the creation of competitions where such robots are tested and the state of the art technology is pushed further. Socialab acquired a Turtlebot2 robot to serve people around the university campus and one day participate in such competitions. With hopes of achieving these goals, the laboratory has proposed a variety of projects over the years, each adding new layers offunctionality to the robot. With each studentthathas tackled their respective project,thedeveloped softwarehasbeencontinuously stacking. However, each completed project has remained separate from each other andhasn’t been used ever since. Hence,the developed software is being wasted. Therefore, it is imperative to integrate all the available software into the robot. Yet, as new projects are proposed, the problem of scattered software can reoccur after the integration of the currently available ones. Furthermore, with more functionality that is developed, the harder and longer it takes to complete their integration. To preventthis entirely, itis necessary to create structural software that eases the development of new functionality as well as its integration with the current software. To achieve this, a class was developed which is responsible for controlling the execution of all processes running in the robot, of which the different software depends on. Additionally, research was done on multiple competitions to identify the most commonly required functionality traits, which we refer to as modules. Afterwards, an implementation of each of these modules was developed. Because of their universality, their implementation allows future software that requires any of the modules to simply import them, rather than having to re-implement them. In line with good software quality practices, if any of the modules needs an upgrade, this upgrade simply has to be performed on the respective module, instead of upgrading every adjacent software that uses this module. This was the first goal of this thesis. After creating a solid foundation for robot software development, the focus shifted towards the creation of new functionality. The different tasks were obtained from the previous research of various robotic competitions. The idea is that if the robot can perform such tasks then it can participate in the competitions, while the same functionalities can be used around campus. The list aimed to be as long as possible with the goal of leaving the robot with as much functionality as possible while taking into consideration the time restraints of the development of this thesis. Seven tasks were selected. The implementation of each task is explained in detail. As each task was developed, the implemented steps were turned into modules, therefore respecting the initial goal of flexible and reusable software. Because of this, as more tasks were developed the following task’s implementation was increasingly simpler as some of the requirements were already available from the development of their predecessors. The tasks required knowledge from different areas of artificial intelligence. This lead to the broadening of my knowledge rather than specialization in a single area. With this work, we show how distinct robotic tasks were implemented. Due to the varied nature ofthe tasks, we show how to tackle a multitude of different problems that appear in the area of artificial intelligence. Additionally, the work presents an approach to create a solid foundation for the development and integration of increasingly more software. The tasks are benchmarked, meaning future updates ofthe tasks can be performed and proved superior through the comparison of their results.