BunnyBot

Jacinda Clemenzi * Piotr Mitros * Ziaieh Sobhani * Stefanie "Princess Flufflepuff" Tellex

Overview

BunnyBot was our entry into the Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory held at MIT in 2002. It performed fairly well. It was the only robot our year capable of bringing back a target beacon.

Algorithm

Drive to waypoint 1 by dead reconing (we know there are no obstacles in the way). Bring it home by odometry.
Triangulate locations of targets, pick closest one
Go in straight line towards closest beacon, periodically triangulating to get distance. To avoid obstacles, we use forward IR. If we detect on obstacle in front of the robot closer than the target, we:
- Check if we can dodge the obstacle by going 45 degrees left or right around it. If so, we do.
- If not, we turn parallel to it, and use a wall following system.
- If at any point we get wedged, we do a pseudorandom walk to get unwedged:
  - We back up 12 inches
  - Turn to a "random" direction. We optimize for directions where we see no obstacles, and away from forward
  - Drive forward a random distance. We repeat until we're unwedged.
Pick up closest beacon, and use same algorithm to bring it home
Repeat from step 2.

See the images for (slightly) more information.