Web Interfacing for Task Supervision and Specification

The Autonomous Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) is engaged in mobile robotics research. The lab’s research focuses mainly on indoor localization and map building, outdoor locomotion and navigation, and micro mobile robotics. In the framework of a research project on mobile robot localization, a graphical web interface for our indoor robots has been developed. The purpose of this interface is twofold: it serves as a tool for task supervision for the researcher, and for task specification for the end-user. Our indoor robots are fully autonomous systems based on the VME-bus standard with a six-axis robot controller carrying a PowerPC processor at 300 MHz. Among the various peripheral devices, they have three main sensors: the wheel encoders, a 360° laser range finder, and a CCD camera. The localization approach is feature based and uses an Extended Kalman Filter to integrate measurements from the encoders, the laser scanner, and the CCD camera. Features are infinite lines for the laser scanner and vertical edges for the vision system.