| The dissertation consists of two major parts--an environment to control and simulate the Cybermotion K2SRV mobile robot and, the design of a generalized, distributed mobile robot simulator. Some of the salient points of the dissertation are: (i) an architecture for a distributed control environment for mobile robots, (ii) an architecture for a generalized mobile robot simulator based on purely geometrical models of the robot and the environment, (iii) a general graphical platform for trying out path planning and sensor fusion algorithms for mobile robotic applications and, (iv) an architecture for distributing a mobile robot simulator on a local area network.; The control environment, called MRDE (Mobile Robot Development Environment), uses a toolkit approach. It consists of a User Interface and a collection of tools, each of which is an independent program which carries out a well-defined function. The User Interface provides a graphical mode of interaction and is responsible for creating and scheduling the execution of the tools, controlling their access to the robot port, and providing status information and tool execution control to the user. The environment also provides a rudimentary robot simulator for the K2SRV which may be used to estimate the response of the robot to user commands and path programs.; The second part of the dissertation concentrates on generalizing the mobile robot simulator so that it does not depend on any specific robot architecture. The simulator consists of a library of functions, called the simulation core, which simulate the various features of a typical mobile robot. Path planning and sensor fusion algorithms may be developed and tested using the core. A sample path planning and a sensor fusion algorithm are implemented on the simulator to demonstrate its functionality and generality.; Finally, an architecture is described which distributes the computationally intensive portions of the simulator on a local area network by splitting the core into a client and several compute-servers. |
