ETIC funds at Eastern Oregon University are supporting six junior and senior undergraduate students in conducting robotics research, furthering applicable research findings and opening up career futures for these students. Eastern Oregon University CSMM program established the Autonomous Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (ARAI) research group during 2007/2008 school year under the guidance of assistant professor Suranga Hettiarachchi.
Research on Robots in Obstacle-Laden Environments
Wheel-based Robots with Navigation Capabilities
The first research project if the ARAI research group involves simulating swarm robotics approaches, mainly to study the behavior of robot interactions in obstacle-laden environments. In the first stage of this research, students experimented with developing a JAVA simulation tool. These simulated robots drive themselves towards a goal maintaining a desired formation based on the virtual forces in their environment mimicking classical physics force laws (Physicomimetics). Currently, there are three students improving the simulation capabilities and addressing issues related to obstacle avoidance in extremely difficult obstacle courses with cul-de-sacs.
In addition to contributing to the field, the undergraduate research opportunities help students to further and discover their career and academic pathways. The EOU ARAI group presented their research findings at the first annual Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges - Southwestern Regional Conference, at California State University - Northridge, in April 2008. Their research article appeared in The Journal of Computing Science in Colleges. ARAI group also presented a poster at the EOU's annual student symposium in May 2008. One of the students involved in this project was accepted to Boise State graduate program in Fall ‘08 and will be working on Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning research.
A second research project involves designing and building wheel based robots with autonomous navigation capabilities. The first autonomous robot named “RECA” was successfully built and tested in Spring ‘08. RECA is an outdoor robot capable of navigating around obstacles towards predetermined GPS coordinates. It uses GPS to localize its position and a single range finder to avoid obstacles. The main computer is TS-7260 that runs on Linux. RECA uses MMP5 robot platform built by the Machine Lab. The picture below shows RECA during the development phase.
Currently, two students are working with RECA enhancing the hardware capabilities and the control algorithms. The research group intends to build another two robots similar to RECA with the intention of applying swarm robotics approaches to real world applications such as surveillance, mapping, search and rescue, and chemical-biological agent detection.