The SEGA project aims to control a robot in a simulated environment. The robot will move around in different arenas trying to accomplish a specific goal. The robot will be controlled fully by our program; no human interaction may be involved.
Aside from creating a quality program, teamwork plays a significant role in this project.
The simulation environment is the game Unreal Tournament 2004. To control and simulate robots, we use the USARSim project. The description from their site:
USARSim (Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation) is a high-fidelity simulation of robots and environments based on the Unreal Tournament game engine. It is intended as a research tool and is the basis for the RoboCup rescue virtual robot comp
The robot model (P2DX) is already defined, as well as the Arenas we will use to test our application: “M-USAR_yellow_250”
Note
Unreal Tournament 2004 has to be purchased in order to use it.
Note
USARSim can be found at this page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/usarsim/
The robot has quite a few sensors, but we are not allowed to use all of them. This makes the the exercise a lot harder because we need more complicated ways of telling where the robot is, what position it is facing, etc.
Our goal is to create a distributed application that can control a robot in the simulation environment.
To achieve this we will have to be able to read and analyse sensor data; as well as being able to control the robot wheels. The sensor data will have to be turned into useful data which can be used to create a map of the arena.
The map on its turn, can be used to calculate paths in the arena.
Since our application will be distributed, every component will be able to run as an independent node.
See the next chapter for more information on the distributed structure.