Lassie Don't Surf – Making the Aibo Tackle the Hill Update Presentation Patrick Hart Justin McHugh Rachel Pocino Robotics – Spring 2005

The Plan That Was The Aibo would follow an object (like the pink ball) over rough terrain. Therefore, we would enable the Aibo to walk: Up an incline (~60°) Down a decline (~60°) Up stairs (~8 inches) Down stairs (~8 inches)

The Plan That Was and Why It Isn’t Using the normal walk, the Aibo won’t go up a 15° slope He refuses to step onto the incline He won’t walk up if you put his front paws on the incline In fact, the best you can get is physically placing him entirely on the slope, and then he’ll walk like crazy - not making any progress, just keeping his place on the incline

The Plan That Was and Why It Isn’t A variety of different walks were tested (some canned and some created) None of them were any more successful than the Tekkotsu normal walk

The Plan That Is In light of these complications and as suggested during our last presentation, the new plan is obstacle avoidance with stairs and slopes coming later, if time permits The Aibo will walk towards the horizon If an obstacle gets in his way, he’ll go around it Our Aibo will return to his original trajectory

Accomplished At the time of writing, the code is entirely planned out We will be using trigonometry to calculate angles and displacement The obvious way of calculating displacement would be d = vt, but neither v nor t is quite accurate with the Aibo (e.g. he doesn’t start instantaneously) So we’ll be using the sensor update as a counter The scanning code is completed

To Accomplish Most of the code has yet to be written The trigonometry will likely be the most difficult of this If stairs and slopes are to be done, they need to be planned out

Schedule Since our original plan was scrapped, so was the timeline 4/18: trig code completed 4/25: physical avoidance completed ?: anything else

Possible Problems with Current Plan The sensor update is being used as a displacement counter, timer for turning the head, and of course, sensing the IR distances This may end up being a drain on resources