ARIA and Matlab Integration With Applications

The course Intelligent Robotics at Umeå University let, like many other similar courses, their students explore different algorithms and architectures using real mobile robots. There is unfortunately no standardized way to interface with robots. Instead each manufacturer provide software developers kits (SDKs) for their own products. This is especially troublesome for robotics courses where students should be able to concentrate on the actual subject and not be forced to spend a lot of time learning to use complex SDKs and even new programming languages. The course at the Umeå University uses robots from two different manufacturers. Khepera robots are controlled from Matlab and AmigoBot robots from C++. Most students are already familiar with the Matlab programming language and feel a bit intimidated by the AmigoBot’s powerful but complex C++ SDK named ARIA. This master’s thesis project is divided into two parts. The first part describes the design and implementation of an adapter layer between the ARIA library and Matlab. This adapter layer allows ARIA-based robots to be controlled directly from within Matlab without using the C++ SDK directly. In the second part of this project a full scale SLAM-application is created that explores some important topics in the robotics field, such as map making and continuous localization.

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