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1. EIEE CBRServer version 6 0 00 Commmication Status Waiting for the first client connection l oad library ve library q uit Figure 66 CBRServer main window The list of the key entries supported by CBRServer is shown in the bottom part of the window To load a CBR library file enter 1 key To save the cases sent by CfgEdit in the memory enter s key Enter q key to quit CBRServer 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 102 3 10 3 Creating an Example Mission Using Mission Expert This example shows you how to construct a mission plan using Mission Expert In this example you will be making a mission in which three robots will conduct an EOD explosive ordnance disposal task after following designated waypoints 1 Check cfgeditrc Option e View your MissionLab home src cfgedit cfgeditre e Make sure DisableMissionEzpert is set as false 2 Run iptserver e You must be running iptserver when the CfgEdit invokes mlab Read Section 3 1 for the explana tion In a separate terminal window run iptserver iptserver 3 Run CBRServer e Open up another terminal window e Go to the demo directory ca your MissionLab home demos mars_demos e Make sure there is an example CBR library file sample_cbrplanner cbl e Run CBRServer with 1 option to load the CBR library file cbrserver l sample_cbrplanner cbl 4 Run CfgEdit with Mission E
2. and Range_01 means this value can be modified by a slider bar The parameters specified in the lines above COOP are the ones that you are going to be able to modify from the CfyEdit window by middle clicking the state in the FSA diagram Their default values are specified in the braces Each parameter then has to be specified within COOP again to be carried into the primitive behaviors indicates that the value is pushed up from higher levels You may also want to note that the numbers specified as nl n2 are coordinates that are used by the CfgEdit window to calculate the position of the items Now let us define our Swirl_Obstacles as the following and paste it in the same files just after MoveToGoal is defined Copy this in both agents gen and agents AuRA urban 7 DOBRO O OOOO OGG GIGI IRA IIIA Swirl_Obstacles Goal_Location swirl_obstacle_sphere swirl_obstacle_safety_margin swirl_obstacle_open_space swirl_obstacle_open_sphere max_sensor_range SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES Goal_Location max_sensor_range sphere Distances_10 swirl_obstacle_sphere safety_margin Distances_10 swirl_obstacle_safety_margin open_space Distances_10 swirl_obstacle_open_space open_sphere Distances_10 swirl_obstacle_open_sphere goal_rel_loc lt 10 50 gt GoalRelLoc 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOO
3. 8 The latest version of this function uses fixed values for the minimum and maximum obstacle radius 2m and 10m respec tively Depending on the mission size these values are corrected to be within 1 1000 and 1 5 of the minimum of the width and height of the mission area You can change these values using SET MIN OBSTACLE RADIUS and SET MAX OBSTACLE RADIUS You can restore the old functionality by setting the constant USE_OLD_RANDOM_OBSTACLE_GENERATOR in src mlab gt world c to a value unequal 0 Note however that in this old version the default values depend on the mission area AND the screen resolution 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 82 where Step name is usually a step number which must end in a period Unit name is the unit which is to receive this command CMD is a command tag which identifies what command is involved START MOVETO TELEOPERATE FOLLOW OCCUPY or STOP and the rest of the information on the line varies depending on the type of command The various command tags CMD are given in the following sections The case of the tags is ignored A step can be composed of several commands which are to be executed at the same time To add additional commands to the step use the token AND between them For example a step with two commands would have the following format Step name UNIT Unit name CMD additional information AND UNIT Unit name CMD additional information Additional commands can be appended using further AND token
4. the following may all be accepted true TRUE True or 1 Other values may be more strict however such as values that specify port strings Since IO ports are treated as files case matters Inclusion of a section in the configuration file does not mean that hserver will connect to that piece of hardware Instead that section may now be specified in the command line Actual hardware connections are executed only if a configuration section is specified in the command line see the section on command line arguments below or by interactively telling hserver to connect to a piece of hardware while it is running 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 92 Currently supported section types and their options are e camera This represents options for a Sony evi D30 Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the camera Default is the empty string e laser This represents options for a SICK LMS200 laser scanner Currently defined values are name This is an identifier for this laser not the same as the section name No two lasers running at the same time should have the same name Default is the empty string port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the laser Default is the empty string angle_offset The direction the laser is pointing in degrees The front of the robot is zero degrees Default is zero
5. e Help Window This window gives a listing of the keyboard commands accepted by the main window This window will pop up or pop down by pressing h key e Message Window This window is a multi purpose window which pops up at the center of the main window displaying HServer Georgia Institute of Technology initially It displays prompts for input and also hardware control menus for individual hardware This window can be moved by using the arrow keys or the numeric keypad with numlock on 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 96 e Terminal Window This window which pops up by pressing I key is for direct connection to a serial device It takes input from the keyboard and outputs it to the serial port and writes data received from the serial port to the window Terminal window commands are initiated with the escape key If you wish to send an escape character 0x1B over the serial line press the escape key twice The followings are key commands that supported by the window a Qa Oo A FP HR Ss x Disconnect terminal and close window Erase terminal window Toggle hex mode all data from the serial port is printed out in hexadecimal Toggle cognachrome mode only outputs data received on the current watched stream Change cog stream Send q as saphira packet quits saphira mode on cognachrome Refresh screen Toggles log mode Terminal output is logged to hserver log file Hide the terminal window e R
6. 105 O 0 Mission Preference Global Settings Task 2 TEoDTask a sa o El xJerofRobots m 1 10 Task 1 Moues E y Task 2 EODTask 0 50 elocity pm Localization EA 0 30 obal Settings F UseLandnarks y Use pe Te MS Enviroment TT msn F outdoor HandlesEneny F False _ True D Oa Task 0 MajpointsTask Apply Cancel Figure 71 mlab showing the setup for the EOD task Mission Preference Global Settings 3 Number OfRobots 1 10 0 50 MaxVelocity au 0 01 1 00 0 30 Aggressiveness ow 0 01 1 00 Figure 72 Mission Preference window to adjust the global setting Figure 73 Summary of loadable mission plans with their suitability ratings 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS mx Star tSubMission SubMissionReady Star tSubMission Eoptask Innedi ate Stop DEPLOY_FIRST MaypointsTask Goal_Location lt 16 87 13 17 gt Goal_Location lt 13 25 10 01 gt Goal _Location lt 1 SubitissionReady EXECUTE_IMMEDIATELY Goal_Location lt 16 87 13 17 gt MoveTowar a Mines NotDetected Hines LookFor EOD_Are Figure 74 cfgedit showing the FSA of the generated mission File Configure Command options Compass Scale Okulu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n Refresh Zoom
7. For the obstacle creation dialog box use MissionLab O0bstacle Creation For the world scale dialog box use MissionLab World Scale For the time scale dialog box use MissionLab Time Scale For a few other resource names run mlab using the X option to see the fallback resources 1This function is not supported by the current version of MissionLab 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 20 3 2 3 File Utilities As shown in Figure 19 the File menu has four entries The first entry Open Mission invokes a file File Configure Command Options Compass Obstacles lissionLab 6 0 00 q File Configure Command Options Open Mission 0 00 0 m Mission Load Overlay Tine Restart y Change Environment Quit Clear all a File menu b Configure menu Figure 19 The file and configure menus dialog box which can be used to locate and load command description files CMDL The details of CMDL are described in Section 3 7 You can also use a shortcut key Ctr o to invoke this function The second entry Load Overlay is for viewing an overlay file ODL ODL is used to describe a mission area of robots you are going to experiment with The details of ODL are explained in Section 3 8 The third entry Restart rewinds a mission when it is finished and runs it again When you want to kill the MissionLab process you can choose Quit from this menu 3 2 4 Obstacle Creation Dialog Box
8. It s optional but include it if you want to reproduce the same obstacles later Specifying a seed value however cannot totally guarantee two identical obstacle fields if a robot is present inside the region Obstacles will not be created over robots so it is possible for the behavior of the robot to affect the creation of obstacles If this is a periodic action i e you create obstacles then destroy them then re create them and so on then you may also want to add the optional seed inc parameter This is an integer value which is used to increment the random seed every time this action is carried out Some examples are REGION 0 0 10 10 ADD OBSTACLE 10 0 5 1 5 REGION 0 0 10 10 ADD OBSTACLE 20 0 5 1 5 5 REGION 0 0 10 10 ADD OBSTACLE 30 0 5 1 5 5 2 All of these will fill regions within the rectangle defined by 0 0 and 10 10 The first line specifies 10 coverage the second specifies 20 and the third specifies 30 All lines specify obstacles with radii between 0 5 and 1 5 meters The first doesn t specify a seed value and the second specifies a value of 5 The third line specifies that the seed value should initially be 5 but in subsequent executions of 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 23 this line the seed should be incremented by 2 each time so seeds for this line will be 5 7 9 and so on 4 To delete a group of obstacles within a region REGION z1 y1 12 y2 REMOVE OBSTACLE As above the region is the rectangle defined by
9. The first part of the file is a description of mission background information It consists of a series of entries which define this information The currently implemented entries are e Mission name The user can specify the mission name with this entry It has the following format MISSION NAME the user s name for the mission e Overlay This entry allows the user to indicate which file to read to load the overlay information It has the following format OVERLAY filename This command should be placed early in the file since it may override some effects of the following commands e Starting point Using this entry the user specify a named starting position This definition overrides any starting point specified in the overlay file assuming they both have the same name It has the following format SP Name x y where x and y are the eastward and northward coordinates of the starting point with respect any origin specified in any previously loaded overlay file e Robot Definition The user can define new robots using this command The format of the command is NEW ROBOT Name executable name Color hostname key value1 keyg valuez where Name is the name of the robots to be used in subsequent unit descriptions and executable name is the filename of the robot executable program The parameter Color is any legal X windows color name hostname is the optional name of a host on which to run the rob
10. coordinate list Control measure for George would have its name printed on the display whereas the control measure for Bill would not Bill s graphics would still print but the identifying name would not This is useful in some situations to reduce the clutter on the screen However please name each control measure with an unique name Currently if there are redundant names for different control measures some of them would not to be drawn correctly The various tags CM are given below The case of the tags is irrelevant Each user supplied name Name must be unique If the user wishes to supply a number for a name it must be done in double quotes eg 1 Descriptions of each type of control measure follow All lengths and distances are in meters e Assembly Area This entry indicates an assembly area It has the format AA Name x y T2Y2 Ln Yn diameter where the coordinates describe the polygon defining the region involved The last point is assumed to be connected to the first The optional value diameter in meters default 50m can be specified if only the coordinate of the center of the position is given then the position is assumed to be circular with the specified diameter If multiple coordinates are given for the border of the position any specified diameter will be ignored e Attack position This entry indicates an attack position It has the format ATK Name ti y 2 Yo Tn Yn diameter where the coord
11. noise members probe members avoid_obs nend node noise is NOISE with persistence 5 0 robot_heading robot_heading nend node probe is PROBE with sphere 2 0 safety_margin 0 5 readings Denning_ultras nend node avoid_obs is AVOID_STATIC_OBSTACLES with sphere 1 0 safety_margin 0 5 readings Denning_ultras nend node robot_heading is GET_HEADING with cur_pos xyt nend node Denning_ultras is ultras with nend node xyt is SHAFTENCODERS with nend Figure 60 The CNL nodes generated to implement the trashbot configuration in the AuRA architecture Notice that the trashbot_FSA_proc is instantiated as a node 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 77 3 7 CMDL Command Description Language The command description file or the CMDL file contains the information necessary to set up a scenario and execute a series of commands The structure and syntax of the command description file is explained in this section The command description file is organized into two parts 1 the background information part and 2 a list of commands to be executed The basic syntax of the file is described below White space such as spaces tabs and blank lines is ignored Comments can be included on any line by using two dashes in a row the rest of the line will be ignored In the following descriptions items in italics would be replaced by appropriate values from the user 3 7 1 Mission background information part
12. x1 y1 and x2 y2 All obstacles within the rectangle will be deleted 3 2 8 Command Interface Panel The first entry of the Command menu Figure 23 is Command Interface and it is used to bring up the command interface panel shown in Figure 24 Lab v6 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology Configure Command Options Compass 0 Command Inter face e Sound Simulation Motivational vector Telop Interface Personality Figure 23 The command menu xi Command lt Type in a command here gt File overwatch_capitol Load File Rewind Commands Execute Commands Single Step Single Step Robots Resune ABORT Executing Step 4 UNIT red team MoveTo PP P3b FORMATION Column Traveling Next Step 5 UNIT blue tean MoveTo PP P4a FORMATION Hedge Traveling fi ri Close Figure 24 Command Interface The command interface panel can be hidden at any time by pressing the Close button on the bottom of the panel The top area of the command interface panel is a text field labeled Command in which the user can enter commands manually The command can be executed by pressing the Execute button on the right side of the text field or by pressing RETURN while the focus is in the text field The second area from the top is the command list execution area It has has a text field labeled File in which the user can enter names for command files to load T
13. x_offset The laser s distance from the center of the robot along the robot s X axis where zero is the center of the robot and positive X is toward the front of the robot The value is assumed to be in cm Default is zero y offset The laser s distance from the center of the robot along the robot s Y axis where zero is the center of the robot and positive Y is toward the robot s left side The value is assumed to be in cm Default is zero listen_ipt A host name from which to listen for laser readings via ipt Default is the empty string send ipt A host name to which laser readings should be sent via ipt Default is the empty string stream_host A host name to which laser readings should be sent via a tcp socket Default is the empty string e cognachrome This represents options for a cognachrome vision system Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the cognachrome Default is the empty string e nomad This represents options for a Nomad 150 or Nomad 200 Currently defined values are type This defines the type of nomad to connect to Valid values are 150 and 200 Default is 150 port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the Nomad 150 Default is the empty string This value isn t needed for Nomad 200s host_name The host name of the Nomad 200 Default is the empty
14. 1 TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION Localization 1 lt TASK END gt 109 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 110 DEFAULT TASK BiohazardTask DEFAULT TASK WEIGHT 1 00 4 SUPPORT SOFTWARE 111 4 Support Software Several existing software packages were used in the development of MissionLab These packages are described briefly here 4 1 Communications Software IPT Communication between the robot programs and the console program mlab is accomplished using the communication package IPT 7 IPT is a transaction oriented communication layer that sits above NSF sockets to simplify their use As was described in Section 3 1 an IPT name server must be executing to enable the robots to find the console MissionLab was developed with IPT version 8 4 but other versions of the IPT server will probably work 4 2 Process Control Software C Threads The robot programs use the C Threads process control software to control execution of the various sub processes C Threads is a light weight non preemptive user level process scheduler package developed at Georgia Tech 16 to support multiprocessor computers It allows development of multi threaded programs which at run time can take maximum advantage of the available free processors Support for inter thread communication and synchronization mechanisms are also provided In the robot program the Configuration Network Language compiler the cnl compiler instantiates each node primitive behavior as a separate thre
15. 1 tion before it can be chosen as the heading by the swirl behavior in meters swirl_open_sphere The maximum distance in meters that obstacles are reacted to 0 1 for use in determining the heading by the swirl behavior Table 2 Robot definition parameter keyword descriptions 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 79 schema based navigation and associated parameters is given in 2 In addition the several keywords can be set to select the type of device to control See Table 3 The keywords described in Table 4 are KEYWORD VALUE DESCRIPTION Default robot_type Selects the type of robot to control Supported values are HOLONOMIC PIONEERAT URBAN HOLONOMIC DRV1 MRV2 MRV3 HUMMER and UNICYCLE_HUMMER run_type Determines if the control program will drive a simulated robot SIMULATION or actual hardware Controlling actual hardware will obviously not work if you don t have any hardware If you do have actual hardware and want to control it contact us at Georgia Tech for assistance Supported values are SIMULATION and REAL robot_color The robot s color in a simulation blue Table 3 Robot definition parameter device type selection keyword descriptions only relevant if run_type is REAL and the hardware is set up appropriately For the version running on linux there is a unfixed memory handling bug which causes crash if color or hostname parameter is missing So please specify the full lis
16. 1 1 0 513 39 400 17 300 0 000 0 000 0 000 1 2 0 517 39 400 17 300 0 000 0 018 0 199 1 2 0 522 39 382 17 499 95 059 0 195 0 044 1 2 0 527 39 321 17 690 107 766 0 189 0 065 1 2 0 532 39 201 17 850 126 840 0 181 0 086 1 2 0 537 39 024 17 943 152 299 0 199 0 021 1 2 0 543 38 839 18 017 158 219 0 197 0 035 1 2 0 569 38 643 18 057 168 417 0 197 0 035 1 3 3 2 19 Debug Options Turning on the debug option in Options menu will dump a huge amount of information of what MissionLab is doing In most of the cases it will print out all the printf statements specified as if debug in the MissionLab source code to the console where you launched mlab For example turning on Debug simulator Ctr1 d or set debug simulator on in the CMDL file will provide the information about mlab while Debug robots Ctrl r or set debug robots on in the CMDL file will provide the information about the robot executables If Report current state is turned on mlab will pop up the window Figure 32 showing the state the robot is currently in This Report current state window can be also invoked by adding S to the mlab command option Current Robot State robot 1 FSA 1 current state State5 SurveyRoomx robot 1 FSA 5 current state Start Stop robot 1 FSA 4 current state Statel LookFor robot 1 FSA 4 current state State2 MoveToward Figure 32 Report Current State Window 3 2 20 Show Line Of S
17. 111 4 2 Process Control Software C Threads ee 111 5 Current Limitations of MissionLab 112 6 FAQ Trouble Shooting 113 7 Feedback and Bug Reports 114 1 WHAT ISMISSIONLAB 1 1 What isMissionLab 1 1 MissionLab Overview MissionLab is a powerful set of software tools for developing and testing behaviors for single robots and a group of robots Code generated by MissionLab can directly control commercial robots ARTV Jr and Urban Robot iRobot AmigoBot and Pioneer AT ActivMedia Inc Nomad 150 and 200 Nomadic Technologies Inc and MRV 2 Denning Mobile Robotics Inc are among those robots MissionLab has implemented successfully A primary strength of MissionLab is its support of both simulated and real robots A developer can experiment with behaviors in simulation and then run those same configurations on mobile robots Figure 1 MissionLab has a distributed architecture Thus the main user s console can run on one computer while multiple robot control executables are distributed across a network potentially on board the actual robots they control The core of the MissionLab tool set is composed of six primary components mlab mlab is a console like program from which a user monitors the progress of experimental runs of the robot executables Locations of the robots and detected obstacles are examples of various data mlab can monitor When mlab is used for simulation as opposed to controlling mobile ro
18. 2 96 3 1 or 3 2 e Open Motif 2 1 http www opengroup org openmotif or LessTif 2 0 Note We noticed that LessTif tends to produce various warnings during the operation of MissionLab Thus we recommend you to use Open Motif 3 Obtain the MissionLab distribution if you haven t yet You can download the latest distribution of MissionLab mlab 6 0 tar gz from our web page http www cc gatech edu ai robot lab research MissionLab Note Supporting Software is included with the MissionLab distribution You are not required to take any special steps regarding this software but we list it here to credit the developers and point out copyright restrictions e IPT A version of IPT is part of the MissionLab source tree IPT is an interprocess commu nication system developed at CMU Also see the file README IPT This release of the Mis sionLab was developed with version 8 4 of IPT If you wish you can ftp the package from ftp ftp cs cmu edu afs cs cmu edu data anonftp user jayg get ipt 8 4 tar gz and IPTMan ual ps gz Due to copyright restrictions IPT MAY NOT BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL PUR POSES CThreads A version of CThreads is now part of the MissionLab source tree It should compile di rectly on Linux or SunOS CThreads is a lightweight process threads package from Georgia Tech which operates under Linux SunOS and many other OSs If you wish you can ftp the package from ftp ftp cc gatech edu pub software cthreads ithread
19. 3 10 2 3 10 5 Customizing Preference and Constraint Sets and Toolbox Types of available preferences and constraints for Mission Expert are defined in your MissionLab home src cfgedit mission_expertrc where the symbolic link is also available in your MissionLab home bin An example of mission expertrc is shown at the end of this section If you wish you may customize this list To add a new feature preference or constraint its definition has to be enclosed within lt FEATURE BEGIN gt and lt FEATURE END gt clauses FEATURE TYPE option determines whether this preference or constraint should affect an entire mission plan 0 or just within a sub mission 1 FEATURE NON INDEX specifies whether this feature should be treated as an index of the case for the case based reasoning If you would like it to be used as an index set it to be 0 If it is used as the index for the case based reasoning FEATURE WEIGHT specifies how much this feature should be weighted with respect to other features FEATURE NAME is the name of the feature FEATURE OPTION TYPE specifies whether available values should be selected from discrete toggle buttons 0 or a continuous slider bar 1 for scaling from 0 10 to 1 00 2 for scaling from 1 to 10 When the toggle button is used each of the available values should be specified with FEATURE OPTION one value per FEATURE OPTION FEATURE SELECTED OPTION specifies the initially selected value the first FEATURE
20. Avoid Obstacle state the behavior of the robot is very similar to the GoTo state When in the Follow Contour state the robot follows the contour of obstacles until it thinks it safe to start heading again towards the goal The transitions between the two states are determined by two triggers this allows the robot to explore the environment until it finally reaches the goal The parameters that you can modify are the sphere of influence of obstacles avoid_obstacle_sphere the maximum and minimum level of bravery of the robot in approaching obstacles when following their contour the higher is the value of u_max val the closest to obstacles the robot is allowed to go the lower is the value of u_min val the farther from obstacles The current distance from obstacles is autonomously determined in relation to u_max_val and u_min_val according to the MicroNavigation rules in order to allow a deeper exploration of the environment when the robot cannot find a path to the goal LOS_GoTo Currently all the behaviors with the LOS Line Of Sight prefix can be used only in simulation The behavior is similar to the GoTo state however this is meant for multirobot applications whenever two or more robots can be considered as members of a cooperating team When no teammates are visible the robot moves towards a location specified in X Y coordinates If a robot comes in sight of another robot they share information about their own targe
21. DARPA Task A447 The main goal for this project was to control the motion of a robot or groups of robots in highly dynamic unpredictable and possibly hostile environments Much of our work in reactive control was applicable to suitably controlling the motion of individual robots 2 as well as the motion of teams of robots 6 When developing software to control teams of robots prior to MissionLab it become apparent that manually determining each configuration of robots and their control software hard coding a task and controlling task execution was complex and error prone Thus part of our research aimed towards the reduction of this complexity by developing tools for configuring robots and their individual control software 14 We began to focus on the ability to specify the instructions for a task in such a manner that computer software can interpret them and decide which commands to send to each robot simulated or real As a result the MissionLab structure of five primary components mlab CfgEdit cdl and cnl was developed and they were included in earlier MissionLab versions Since the release of MissionLab version 3 0 we have switched the target operation system from SunOS to Linux Current MissionLab version runs on RedHat Linux version 8 0 For Version 4 0 a number of robot behaviors were added for urban warfare operations DARPA TMR and a new tool HServer which can control various robot and sensor hardware was created T
22. FEATURE WEIGHT 0 00 FEATURE NAME MaxVelocity FEATURE OPTION TYPE 1 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 0 5 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 0 FEATURE NON INDEX 1 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 00 FEATURE NAME Aggressiveness FEATURE OPTION TYPE 1 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 0 3 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt 108 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 1 FEATURE NON INDEX O FEATURE WEIGHT 0 90 FEATURE NAME Localization FEATURE OPTION TYPE O FEATURE SELECTED OPTION O FEATURE OPTION UseLandmarks FEATURE OPTION UseMaps lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 1 FEATURE NON INDEX O FEATURE WEIGHT 0 80 FEATURE NAME Environment FEATURE OPTION TYPE O FEATURE SELECTED OPTION O FEATURE OPTION Indoor FEATURE OPTION Outdoor lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 1 FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 70 FEATURE NAME HandlesEnemy FEATURE OPTION TYPE O FEATURE SELECTED OPTION O FEATURE OPTION False FEATURE OPTION True lt FEATURE END gt Local Tasks Available button names are BiohazardBtn MineBtn OtherBtn lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME BiohazardTask TASK BUTTON NAME BiohazardBtn lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME EODTask TASK BUTTON NAME MineBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION Environment 1 lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME WaypointsTask TASK BUTTON NAME WaypointsBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION Environment
23. Figure 56 After compiling and executing the robot exe cutable if your robot leaves the trace that swirls around the obstacle Figure 57 you have successfully added a new state S ce m IEE Figure 55 CfgEdit the new state GoTo_with_Swirl created The procedure for adding a new trigger is very similar to adding a new state that described above However for the trigger make sure that you choose the CNL code that been called from the trigger has 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 66 i Tuned iate eii AtGoal Goal_Location lt 5 0 11 4 gt GoTo_with_Swirl with GoTo_with_Swirl Goal_Location lt 5 0 11 4 gt Goal _Location lt 35 5 11 4 gt AtGoal Goal_Location lt 5 0 11 4 gt m _Planner Figure 56 CfgEdit a sample mission for the GoTo_with_Swirl state File Configure Command Options Compass Help Scale Olly 1 0 Mission area is 45 0 by 45 0n Refresh Pause Zoom 100 y A StartPlace GoTo_with_Swirl E Figure 57 mlab testing the GoTo_with_Swirl state 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 67 procedure bool instead of procedure Vector Since it is not a vector you do not make an assemblage using the cooperative coordination operator COOP cnl neither 3 4 11 Using Mission Expert The Mission Expert functionality is explained in Section 3 10 Page 100 3 THE MISSIONLAB
24. OPTION is 0 and the second one is 1 etc If the slider bar is used the initially selected value should be specified with FEATURE SELECTED OPTION and FEATURE OPTION does not have to be specified The tasks in the toolbox e g Biohazard EOD etc can be also customized in this file The task defini tion has to be enclosed within lt TASK BEGIN gt and lt TASK END gt clauses TASK NAME sets the name of the task TASK BUTTON NAME chooses which type of button to use Currently available button types are BiohazardBtn MineBtn OtherBtn Additionally the initially selected value specified with FEATURE SELECTED OPTION in the feature section above can be overridden with TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION for this particular task The name of the default task and its weight can be specified with DEFAULT TASK and DEFAULT TASK WEIGHT respectively 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Example mission_expertrc FEATURE TYPE GLOBAL O LOCAL 1 FEATURE NON INDEX FALSE 0 TRUE 1 FEATURE WEIGHT Choose it from 0 00 to 1 00 FEATURE OPTION TYPE defined in mission_expert_types h TOGGLE 0 SLIDER1 1 0 10 1 00 SLIDER10 2 1 10 HH HH HH H HOH OH HOH OH HOH OH lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE O FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 90 FEATURE NAME NumberOfRobots FEATURE OPTION TYPE 2 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 1 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 0 FEATURE NON INDEX 1
25. TOOLS 68 3 5 CDL Configuration Description Language The configuration editor uses the Configuration Description Language CDL as its file representation CDL is an agent based programming language based on the Societal Agent theory which presents a uniform view of all robot configuration components as agents It uses a functional notation to support recursive construction of assemblages and named instantiation to support reusing components in multiple assemblages Binding points are used in the configuration to denote connections to hardware devices An explicit binding step is used to denote which sensors actuators and robots are to be attached to the binding points Code generators have been created which output CNL code for the AuRA architecture and SAUSAGES code for the UGV architecture An example for a CDL representation of a configuration is shown below Note that as the robot binding point RobotBP defines the configuration The notation used to name the vehicle binding point is instance_name definition_name which specifies that this instance of definition name is to be called instance_name The parameter bound_to is used to note the binding of robot stimpy an instance of a MRV2 Denning robot The FSA is specified as defining the robot The states appear as instances of the society parameter and the transitions appear as the list of rules A named instance of an agent used multiple places is created with the instAgent command or instOp for
26. an FSA gains scope when that state becomes active and looses it when a new state takes over Code within body blocks is surrounded with a while loop and executes once for each new set of input parameters The predefined output parameter for the procedure is named output A CNL configuration can be viewed as a directed graph where nodes are threads of execution and edges indicate dataflow connections between producer nodes and consumer nodes For example both Figures 59 and 60 present a CNL representation of the trashbot configuration Figure 59 shows the procedure generated to implement the FSA specified by the user and Figure 60 shows the nodes created to implement the configuration in CNL Each node in the configuration is an instantiation of a C function forked as a lightweight thread using the C Threads package 16 developed at Georgia Tech UNIX processes are examples of heavyweight threads which use the operating system for scheduling Lightweight threads are generally non preemptive and scheduled by code linked into the user s program All lightweight threads execute in the same address space and can share global variables The advantage of lightweight threads is that a task switch takes place much faster than between heavyweight threads allowing large scale parallelism Current robot configurations are using around 50 threads with little overhead while that many UNIX processes is not feasible Code for thread control and communication synch
27. boundary entry describes one boundary It is likely that several entries will be necessary since many scenarios have several boundaries e Door This entry indicates a door object of the overlay It has the format Door Name z Yi Ta Y2 where the coordinates describe the line associated with a door The robot can detect this control measure as a door object and can be marked or unmarked e Gap This entry indicates a gap It has the format Gap Name x y 12 Y2 width where the coordinates describe a straight line segment from one end of the gap to the other The final optional term width is the width of the gap in meters it defaults to 40m if unspecified e Hallway This entry indicates a hallway object of the overlay It has the format Hallway Name 11 Y T2 Y2 T3 Y3 4 Ya wes Tn Yn where the first two points describe the center line of the hallway and the rest of the points describe a closed polygon When the robot is inside this polygon it can be distinguished as it is in the hallway e Line of Departure Line of Contact This entry indicates a line of departure line of contact It has the format LDLC Name 21 y T2aY2 Ln Yn Note that the friendly forces are assumed to be on the right side of this line heading from its beginning towards its end e Objective This entry indicates an objective It has the format OBJ Name z yy YTaY2 Tn Yn diameter where the coordinates describe the polygon defining the region involved The
28. click a line is drawn connecting the center of the disk with the click location The direction of this line corresponds to the direction of the sound source and its length corresponds to the sound volume This interface generates a continuous and sustained sound in simulation To stop the sound the user should middle click inside the white circle or left click again to specify a different sound direction and volume To quit the sound simulation click the End SoundSim button 3 2 10 Motivational Vector Window To provide a variety of behaviors MissionLab was augmented with motivational variables These variables correspond to internal states of the robot and can be used to simulate motivations and or emotions These variables are kept in a database and their values can be updated by different states and triggers or they can be directly changed by the user through the use of the motivational vector interface Figure 26 This interface can be invoked from the Command menu Please note that this is similar to the Personality Interface 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 25 Sound Simulation Immediate Effect y Delayed Effect Cuemlt End Soundsin SoundSim en Figure 25 Sound Simulation Window Section 3 2 12 but implemented differently For example this interface can only apply to the CfgEdit type robot while the personality function is only implemented in the manually coded type robot See Section 3 3 which explains
29. composed with the following nested sub FSA states and triggers Start Immediate LookFor Detect NotDetected MoveToward Near TestObject TestNegative Test Positive and ExitTask e Talk The robot reads and talks specified message e Telop It enables the Teleautonomous Operation Telop You can drive the robot with a joystick like window e Terminate The robot will terminate the mission by killing its own process e TerminateObject The robot terminates the nearest red object e TestObject The robot performs a test to identify the object The user can use the Test Positive or Test Negative trigger both explained below to get out from the state and move on to next one e UnmarkDoorway The robot unmarks the nearest doorway e WaitForProceed The robot stops moving until proceeding mission is granted e Wander The robot moves in random directions e WanderRoom This state also contains nested sub FSA states and triggers Assuming that the robot is in a room the robot tries to moves randomly while it tries to maintain being inside the room until a timer expires WanderRoom is composed of the following sub FSA states and triggers Start Immediate Wander InRoom EnterRoom InHallway Wait and ExitTask 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 49 If you create more than one state in the mission you can connect them with triggers Once the condition specified in the trigger is satisfied the robot will transition to the next state to whic
30. configure cd net hr1 robot mission src ipt include No such file or directory configure cd net hr1 robot mission src ipt lib No such file or directory make install C ipt src communications ipt make 1 Entering directory net hri robot mission src ipt src communications ipt g g DLINUX I c unixcommunicator cc o LINUX unixcommunicator o unixcommunicator cc 30 libc h No such file or directory make 1 LINUX unixcommunicator o Error 1 make 1 Leaving directory net hri robot mission src ipt src communications ipt make iptserver Error 2 It usually happens when you did not specify a correct path in MLAB_HOME in your MissionLab home src make include Unfortunately however once you get this error we found that the only way to recover from this is to start from the beginning unpacking the MissionLab tar file I was able to compile a mission However when I try to run the mission mlab pops up but the robot never starts The console leaves this error message How can I fix this problem IPT Client Version 8 3 0 Module Name Console_15488 Server Host Name localhost Made connection IPT Server localhost Attempting to execute defaultRobot1 x 5 0 y 5 0 h 0 0 i 1 c Console_15488 l columbus t localhost Unable to exec the robot No such file or directory Unable to start robot 1 in send_robot_command gt e g teshrc Read the section in the manual where it describes how to
31. e Scenario name This entry names the scenario for which this overlay data pertains It has the following format SCENARIO scenario name e Site name This entry indicates the site on which the overlay information is superimposed This would might eventually include exact information about exactly what map should be accessed It has the following format SITE site name e Mission area This entry indicates the extent of of the mission area The format for this command is MISSION AREA width height where width is the width east west of the mission area and height is its height north south both in meters This mission area is scaled appropriately to fit within the scrollable map area The default mission area is 1km by 1km Note that this command forces recomputation of a number of length related values and should be including early in the overlay file e origin location This entry indicates the origin for the overlay In other words the lower left hand corner of the map display area is considered to be at these coordinates For convenience all the coordinates in the following control measures are with respect to this origin The format of the command is ORIGIN X Y where X is value of the east west origin and Y is the value of the north south origin In the following control measures x increases in the eastward direction and y increases in the northward direction from this origin If this statement is omitted an origin of ze
32. explanatory dialog boxes The About dialog box gives information about the version of the program and the software creators The Copyright dialog shows the full copyright agreement protecting this software 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 34 3 3 Robot Executables When you run MissionLab whether for simulation or real robots mlab Section 3 2 forks a program called robot executable for each robot The robot executable contains two main libraries that are used to carry out a mission The first library libenl a stores a set of the primitive behaviors coded in the Configuration Network Language CNL These primitive behaviors are based on Motor Schema theory 2 and details are explained in 1 The other library libhardware_drivers a stores a set of functions that communicate with the mlab console and if it is for the real robots give commands to the robot hardware or to the low level software embedded on the robot using Hardware Server or HServer Section 3 9 In this case the robot executable serves as HClient and talks to HServer using IPT Section 4 1 There are currently two methods to create the robot executable The first method is through the Configuration Editor CfgEdit CfgEdit can create the robot executable with a graphical user interface Thus you do not have to do any coding PatrolCarRobot1 and PedestrianRobot1 in the your Mission Lab home demos tmr_demos are examples of this CfgEdit type robot Details on Cf
33. for the slider bar as well as information regarding each of the behavioral parameters that the slider bar effects The title must be a single word Each behavioral parameter is specified by the key for the behavioral parameter as it appears in the robots databases a base value for the parameter and an indication of whether the parameter is to be incremented or decremented when the personality trait is increased It is easiest to explain the format of the personality file by examining an example file The personality file for the default personality window is presented here Number of sliders 2 title Aggressiveness num_params 2 key navigation_move_to_goal_gain 2Currently the personality function is only implemented in the manually coded type robots robot tmr_robot 1998 which are explained in Section 3 3 Thus it does not apply for the CfgEdit type robot 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 28 base 0 8 inc 1 key navigation_avoid_obstacle_gain base 1 5 inc 0 title Wanderlust num_params 2 key navigation_noise_gain base 0 1 inc 1 key navigation_formation_gain base 1 0 inc 0 The first entry indicates that there are two personality traits in the window Then for each personality trait there is a group of lines The first group is for the aggressiveness trait The title line indicates that the personality trait is to be labeled Aggressiveness The num_params line indicates that this is a grouping of two pa
34. hallway InRoom Transition occurs when the robot is within a room the THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 50 IsFacing The transition occurs when the robot is facing a specified compass direction MarkedDoorway The transition occurs when the nearest doorway has been marked MessageSent The transition occurs immediately after a message has sent MovedDistance The transition occurs when the robot has moved a desired distance Near The transition occurs when the robot is near specified objects Never The transition does not occur It may be useful for debugging NoProgress The transition occurs when the robot is stuck and making no progress moving towards the specified goal NotAtEndOfHall The transition occurs when the robot is not near the end of the hallway NotDetected The transition occurs when the object once detected by the robot is no longer in sight NotHolding The transition occurs when the robot is not holding the specified object Notified The transition occurs when the robot receives a message that was sent by the Notify state or the NotifyRobot state both explained above SetFlag The transition occurs immediately and this trigger sets the named flag to true SkipGoal The transition occurs when skip waypoint button is pressed in console SubMissionReady See StartSubMission task above TaskExited As it was explained in the ExitTask section above the transition occurs when the robot is in the ExitTask state o
35. instBP Loc NAME from BP_CLASS ParmSet RefGroup AgentList Loc nstGroup instGroup Loc NAME from AgentList LinkorA gent Agent Link AgentList LinkorA gent AgentList LG 71 Consider the following example CDL configuration for a robot that simply moves forward until terminated by the operator The first line binds the configuration to the AuRA architecture The next line defines the vehicle binding point This binding point is bound to a MRV2 robot named stimpy in the next line The agent creating movement for the robot is an instance of the move_to_goal behavior named mtg 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 72 Move to_goal has two parameters the relative location of the goal and the maximum it must be to the goal before declaring success In this case the relative goal location is hard coded at 10 meters straight ahead This will act as a carrot on a stick keeping the robot moving north until it is terminated by the operator bindArch AuRA urban move_forward vehicle bound_to stimpy MRV2 mtg MOVE_TO_GOAL goal_rel_loc lt 0 0 gt 10 0 success_radius lt 0 0 gt 1 0 lt 150 95 gt lt 317 69 gt lt 214 64 gt The Configuration Description Language is a powerful tool aiding users in creating recursive specifications of multiagent configurations The uniform representation of components at all levels of abstraction as agents simplifies object exchange and reuse CDL is usable as a text based language but th
36. install MissionLab 7 FEEDBACK AND BUG REPORTS 114 7 Feedback and Bug Reports We welcome your feedback about this software One of the purposes of releasing this software is to get some feedback from other researchers We very much want to receive any suggestions complaints or questions about MissionLab Theoretical and administrative questions should be addressed to Prof Ronald Arkin College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology 801 Atlantic Dr Atlanta GA 30332 0280 arkin cc gatech edu If you encounter a bug please document it as completely as possible and send that information to us via email to mlab cc gatech edu References 10 11 12 Arkin R C Behavior Based Robotics Cambridge the MIT Press 1998 Arkin R C Motor Schema Based Mobile Robot Navigation International Journal of Robotics Re search Vol 8 No 4 August 1989 pp 92 112 Arkin R C Clark R J and Ram A Learning Momentum On line Performance Enhancement for Reactive Systems Proceedings of the 1992 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automa tion May 1992 pp 111 116 Arkin R C Collins T R and Endo Y Tactical Mobile Robot Mission Specification and Execution Proceedings of SPIE Vol 3838 Mobile Robots XIV 1999 Balch T and Arkin R C Avoiding the Past A Simple but Effective Strategy for Reactive Naviga tion Proc 1993 IEEE International Conference on
37. is for general output All error and debugging information will be displayed here The main window accepts commands to start new hardware and to bring up control menus for connected hardware In addition to the main window the figure below also shows the message window located at the center right in the figure The message window is described below The following key commands are accepted by the main window B Display laptop battery information if it is available C Start Sony EVI D30 camera if not connected or show the camera control menu c Clear text window 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 95 v ODD BSB O N Hu P Qh WH VY lt K 2 a HHR Robot name is fred Figure 63 HServer main window Change report levels Display the sensors window Start emulated robot or show the emulated robot control menu Connect to the GPS unit Toggle the showing of the help window Connect to IPT Connect to the KVH C100 compass Start SICK laser scanner or show the laser control menu Start Newton Cognachrome Vision System or show the Cognachrome control menu Pause the text on the screen Disconnect all hardware and exit or close the message window if it is open Show the remote control used to connect to robots or control them Refresh screen Start terminal if it is not connected or show the terminal window Start video or show video control window Show the robot configuration Create xwindow or show xwindow Connect to a Crossbow DMU VGX gyroscope
38. is not already connected then first press R to get a menu to connect the robot d Disconnect the robot r Refresh screen x Exit control menu e Sensors Window This window gives a listing of the robot sensors and current sensor information It is updated twice a second This window will pop up by pressing E key from the main window e Camera Control Menu This window handles the miscellaneous controls of Sony camera This window will pop up by pressing C key from the main window d Disconnect camera t Set tracking mode supporting the following modes none No tracking 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 98 center Center camera sweep X Sweep pan back and forth sweep Y Sweep tilt back and forth sweep XY Sweep from min pan 0 tilt gt max pan 0 tilt gt max pan max tilt gt min pan max tilt largest object cognachrome Track largest object on all three channels largest A cognachrome Track largest object on channel A largest B cognachrome Track largest object on channel B largest C cognachrome Track largest object on channel C closest laser reading Track pan to face closest laser reading Refresh screen Center camera Toggle camera power Exit control menu e Laser Control Menu This window handles the controls of SICK laser scanner To get to this window first press L from the main window If there are any lasers to control you will be given a choice to ad
39. last point is assumed to be connected to the first The optional value diameter in meters default 50m can be specified if only the coordinate of the center of the objective is given then the objective is assumed to be circular with the specified diameter If multiple coordinates are given for the border of the objective any specified diameter will be ignored e Object This entry indicates a circular object It has the format OBJECT x y diameter Fixed Movable Container color where x and y specify the center of the obstacle and diameter gives its diameter all in meters The three classes of objects are as follows Fixed objects can not be moved and are usually obstacles Movable objects can be manipulated by the robots Container objects can hold movable objects placed there by the robots Objects in a container are not visible to robots 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 88 Passage Point This entry indicates a passage point It has the format PP Name x y diameter where x and y describe the location of the passage point The optional value diameter in meters default 10m gives the diameter of the passage point Phase line This entry indicates a phase line It has the format PL Name z y T2Y2 Tn Yn Room This entry indicates a room object of the overlay It has the format Room Name 21 Y Y2aY2 Tn Yn where the coordinates describe the closed polygon When the robot is inside this polygon it can
40. left clicking the Analyze button located above the Compile button However because of the copyright issue Honeywell s rta is not included in theMissionLab package Thus the current Analyze button will invoke a dummy program that mimics Honeywell s rta but the result will be of course meaningless 3 4 9 Executing the Robot Executable As you can see from Figure 15 on Page 14 upon compilation CfgEdit takes the following steps e CDL CNL The CDL Configuration Description Language file that contains information of the mission you created will be bound to your MissionLab home lib agents AuRA urban file that contains 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 60 Kind of Assenblage Flags Instance of base Kind of Actuator Instance of QLEARN El 5 triggers p 5 max_vel D 2 base_vel 1 0 sistance m p 05 cautious_vel false cautious_node Instance of camera Kind of Actuator QfileNane savoid_obstacle_safety E ActionTimeout sox sensor ronne Figure 53 CfgEdit Sample Configuration for Q Learning all the definitions for the states and triggers and the cdl code generator produce a CNL Configuration Network Language code As default the CNL code will be saved in tmp directory e CNL gt C As soon as the CNL code is generated the cnl compiler will be invoked and it will be translated into a C code e
41. middle click on it like you did for the state Figure 13 ells ko ETE Figure 12 CfgEdit a list of triggers can been seen by right clicking on one of the triggers you created e By adding one more trigger from the second GoTo state to the first one with the at goal location to be 30 20 you have completed creating a back_and_forth robot Figure 14 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB E AtGoal Goal_Location_ lt 10 20 Start ov el lon marzo Rosana ma Figure 13 CfgEdit the parameters for a trigger can be modified by middle clicking on it the trigger AtGoal Goal_Location lt 20 30 gt AtGoal Goal Location lt 10 20 gt Figure 14 CfgEdit the back and forth robot configuration 13 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 14 6 Save the Back_and_Forth Robot Configuration e You can save this configuration for its future use by selecting Save Configuration As from the File menu on top of the window 7 Compiling the Robot Executable e After creating the configuration for the back_and_forth robot you can now create a robot exe cutable by left clicking the Compile button in the left menu bar e You will see a pop up window Figure 15 showing compilation progress e Left click OK ru 4 Levei Start Over e ans SSS marzo coepite a when the compilation is finished Figure 15 CfgEdit com
42. moving the joystick to the desired direction will result in teleoperation and will be reflected in the display as a line in the joystick display 3 2 12 Personality Window The last entry in the Command menu is Personality which invokes the personality window Figure 28 The personality window allows the user to interactively modify the behavioral parameters values of the robots in terms of the individual parameters or more abstract groupings such as personality traits Personality 50 Aggressiveness 50 as Wander lust Close Window Figure 28 Personality Window This personality window contains two slider bars that affect the aggressiveness and wanderlust of the robots Moving the slider bar to the right increases the trait while moving the slider bar to the left de creases the trait Increasing the aggressiveness increases the robots desire to reach their goal location while decreasing the desire of robots to avoid obstacles Increasing the wanderlust increases the amount of noise in the robots movements while decreasing their desire to stay in formation The user can specify his own set of personality traits by creating a personality file and specifying it on the command line with the p option The format of the personality file is a single line that indicates the number of personality sliders followed by groups of information for each personality The group for each personality contains a title
43. options X Print the X fallback resources for MissionLab and quit 3 Enable the 3D mode 3D views of the layout will be shown They are top view side view and front view The robot in the views is shown as a six legged robot Other objects in the views are shown as squares instead of circles as in the 2D view The 3D views are updated on every fifth 2D view update so the display will not slow down the simulation dramatically Refer to Section 3 2 22 for more details 3 2 2 X Motif Resources for mlab MissionLab operates best on color monitors but should work adequately on monochrome monitors mlab uses the X Motif widget set but should run under any X based window manager The defaults for various X Motif related display characteristics can be overridden by the user by adding resource statements to their X11 Xdefaults file For instance the following resource statement may be useful MissionLab background LightSkyBlue3 This directive causes all the backgrounds in MissionLab to be displayed using the LightSkyBlue3 color The size of the main display window can be changed by using the following geometry directive MissionLab geometry 850x600 10 200 This same directive could have been given on the command line also using the geometry option Note that this directive does not affect the size of the scrollable map area To change the characteristics of the com mand interface panel use the resource MissionLab Command Interface
44. or the obstacles at any point The path planning module uses the A algorithm to find the path 6 Outputs a text file which specifies the path that the robot should follow The format of this file is described below File Format for the Map Files map 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS E iancd ate Localize Hew Location lt 13 53 12 48 Tunediate Gora toa Goal_Location lt 13 53 12 48 gt Goal_Location lt 13 53 12 46 gt Gato Goal_Locatlon lt 17 50 15 55 gt ntGoar Goal_Location lt 17 50 15 55 gt Cote Goal Location 28 73 17 95 gt Ateoa Garo iAtGoal Goal Location lt 17 67 17 95 Goal Location lt 17 67 17 98 gt f Goal Location lt 17 50 15 55 Gare Goal_Location lt 17 50 15 55 gt Alo ral Goal Location lt 28 13 17 95 gt GoTo Goal_Location 28 92 13 98 gt Tiemi E Coal Location 25 92 13 90 D Figure 47 CfgEdit generated FSA by the path planner Elle Configure Command Gptions Compass Help Scale Oyl 1 00 Mission area is 45 Om by 45 0 Refresh Zoom 100 a East Entry Hohi le Robotics Lab hal Iway1 sauple_planner Figure 48 mlab a robot following the path planned by the path planner 54 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 55 The map file describes the
45. point The first two numbers are the point s x and y coordinates The next four numbers specify values for the parameters of the GoTo assemblage move_to_location_gain avoid_obstacle_gain avoid_obstacle_sphere avoid obstacle_safety_ margin which CfgEdit builds for each point The last parameter is used By CfgEdit to set the value for the Goal_Tolerance parameter of the AtGoal trigger coming out of the GoTo state To summarize Each line contains 7 numbers corresponding to x move_to_location_gain 4The common user need not be concerned with this file it serves just as an interface between two programs that are likely to change often 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 57 avoid_obstacle_gain avoid_obstacle_sphere avoid_obstacle_safety_margin Goal_Tolerance Known Bugs Currently there is no way to specify which map file to use with the planner when the planner is called from CfgFdit It is hardwired in the code that the default file is marc3f map However if the path planner is called without parameters it will prompt for a file name When running a mission generated with the planner the robot appears to jump from its initial point to the start point for the mission This is due to the fact that the start position of the robot is specified in the default overlay file and the robot is drawn there before the mission is even started Therefore the first state of the FSA generated by the planner is localize which changes the robo
46. robot executable on a remote machine If it is commented the name of the user who are running mlab will be used Note It only affects if you specified a machine name in the Remote host computer field of the run dialog RemoteShellUserName demo The machine name that laserfit is running on LaserFitMachineName columbus Default robot color DefaultColor blue Default HServer ID that the robot executable and HServer connect each other via IPT DefaultHServerName fred Directory to write the event logs None are written if this is empty EventLogDir Directory to write the event replay CDL files The event logging above has to be on None are written if this is empty or the event logging is off ReplayDir Directory for saving the Mission Expert output data files The files will be deleted if this option is commented MExpDataFilesDir Name with path for the socket of CBR Planner CBRServerSocketName tmp robot cbrplanner socket The first robot s start position It has to be defined as PP If it is commented default StartPlace will be used FirstRobotStartPlace StartPlace 36 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 37 Offsets to start robots at This is for the 2nd and later robots in the multi robot mission The first robot won t be affected Not for the extra robots RobotStart_dx 1 RobotStart_dy O Extra robots to add to the run ExtraRobots Enemy r
47. string This value isn t needed for Nomad 150s e amigobot This represents options for a AmigoBot Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the Pioneer Default is the empty string e pioneer This represents options for a Pioneer Currently defined values are 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 93 port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the Pioneer Default is the empty string e framegrabber This represents options for a framegrabber Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the framegrabber Default is the empty string e gps This represents options for a GPS unit Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the GPS unit Default is the empty string use_base This is a boolean value that tells whether or not hserver should connect to a GPS base station Defaults to false base lat The latitude in degrees of the base station Default is 33 78135 base station on Ga Tech campus base_long The longitude in degrees of the base station Default is 84 40034 base station on Ga Tech campus x diff The difference in meters of the X position as defined by the GPS unit and as defined by the controlling application s coordinate system Default is 220
48. that is used to generate the obstacles randomly The seed should be an integer number SET SHOW TRAILS ON OFF If set ON the robots leave trails as they move SET HIGHLIGHT REPELLING OBSTACLES ON OFF If set ON when a robot is close enough to an obstacle for it to be repelled by it a circle will be drawn around the obstacle outlining its zone of influence If the robot gets closer than the safety margin a red circle will be drawn at the diameter of the safety margin SET SHOW MOVEMENT VECTORS ON OFF If set ON the a red line will be drawn in each motion cycle indicating the direction and magnitude of the motion that the robot desires to complete The manually coded type robot described in Section 3 3 It does not apply for the CfgEdit type robot 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS KEYWORD VALUE DESCRIPTION Default tty_num Select the serial port to use to talk to the robot The value should be an integer such as 0 or 1 and is used to form a device name such as dev tty0 or dev tty1 0 timeout Select the packet timeout delay in 1 10ths of a second used when talking to the robot The value should be an integer such as 10 or 15 40 4 seconds use_lawn Is the serial port connected to the robot using LAWN radio modems The value should be either YES or NO NO lawn_name If use_lawn is YES this specifies the name of the LAWN radio mounted on the robot The value should be a text str
49. that you can modify the gains of their primitive behaviors that are incorporated into the state For example if you increase move_to_location gain the attraction to the goal becomes larger while increasing avoid_obstacle_gain will cause repulsion from obstacles to be larger The other parameters you can modify from this window are sizes for the sphere of influence and safety sphere for the obstacle avoidance behavior avoid_obstacle_sphere and avoid_obstacle_safety_margin respectively The zone of influence is the area where robots react with the obstacles and if the robots are in the safety zone virtual collisions are assumed to occur To see how gains are set in your constructed FSA toggle Show state trigger parameters function in the third entry of the Layout menu 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS TaskExi ted TaskExi ted NO BIOHAZARD DETECTED TEST POSITIVE Figure 41 CfgEdit two ExitTask triggers pointing out from the SurveyRoom state rip 4 Level Ez e ay Fmatyzs aa a Figure 42 CfgEdit modifying parameters for the GoTo state THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 45 GotoOutdoor_CBR This behavior is based on the GoToOutdoorNavigation behavior As ex plained for GoTo_CBR below the behavioral parameters are determined by a Case Based Reasoning system Note this CBR is totally independent from the CBR used in CBRServer The only difference is that t
50. the difference between these two types of robots The behaviors that utilize this motivational variables are listed in Section 3 4 4 Motivational Vector Curiousity Close Window Figure 26 Motivational Vector Window 3 2 11 Telop Interface In some cases you may want to drive a robot using a mouse or joystick to influence the direction in which the robot moves Some robots you create with CfgEdit or a generic robot executable that come with the MissionLab package are implemented with Telop capability which allow users to maneuver robots with a joystick like interface Figure 27 The Teleautonomous Operation Telop interface can be invoked by choosing the fourth entry Telop Interface of Command menu The Telop interface is divided into two sections The section on the upper right is the Status Window On the upper right of the Status Window there is an egocentric view of the sensor data The small rectangle represents the robot facing forward towards the top of the screen This is exactly the same as the sensor display in the main MissionLab window except it is from the robot s perspective Below that is the Objective display which shows the world coordinates of the current goal of the robot The first two numbers are the coordinates of the goal the next is the distance to the goal and the last is the angular distance to the goal L is for left and R is for right Under the Objective is the Target display which shows the cu
51. the overlay location In other words there will be a problem if users want to select an overlay which is not in the same directory as Empty ovl e When mlab R some_cmdl was executed mlab at first loads overlay which is in the cmdl file Let s say default ovl was specified by cmdl file Now because of this R option mlab will show the list of overlay files that are in the directory cfgeditrc specified so that users can chose the overlay which is suited for the mission Let s say the user wants mission_A ovl The bug is that if the robot is supposed to start at StartPlace and there are different StartPlaces between default ovl and mission A ovl then mlab chooses the one in default ovl instead of the one in mission A ovl e mlab cannot execute the next command in cmdl when it is running robots with the following situation Suppose CarRobot created by CfgEdit moves back and forth on a road and scout robots trying to cross the road by going through multiple points The first command is to start CarRobot and scout robots and the 2nd command is to move scout robots to another point The problem here is cmdl cannot get to the 2nd command because the CarRobot never stops It needs some way to parallel process each Command List so that the CarRobot can be executed in the background while scout robots execute the commands in the other command list sequentially e mlab has sever
52. the scrollable map display area The default is 1000 but it may desirable to change this in some situations For instance if your system runs out of memory allocating the pixmap for the scrollable map area you may want to specify smaller values for the width and height using the H and W options 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 19 h Print out a help message explaining the command line options for MissionLab I hostname Allows the user to tell MissionLab the name of the host on which IPT is running hostname This supersedes any hostname specified through the environment variable IPT HOST L Turns on the robot data logging mode n Forces MissionLab not to pop up the copyright message upon starting execution p psnfile Tells MissionLab to use the file psnfile for setting up the Personality window R Asks for an overlay file and then runs the mission with the overlay r Tells MissionLab to automatically run the command file after starting S Turns on the report current state mode s seed Specifies a seed an integer number with which to start the random number generator used by the program W width Allows the user to specify the width in pixels of the scrollable map display area The default is 1000 but it may desirable to change this in some situations For instance if your system runs out of memory allocating the pixmap for the scrollable map area you may want to specify smaller values for the width and height using the H and W
53. using grammar pro ductions Keywords printed in bold face such as defArch are terminal symbols Punctuation and grouping characters such as are also terminal symbols The symbol e denotes an empty production that is one that can match nothing The remainder are nonterminals which are defined on the left side of a production The main objects in CDL are the agents coordination operators binding points and hardware devices The remainder of the productions deal with architecture and binding related issues Start Start DefineClass Start DefineBP Start InstAgent Start InstGroup Start InstSorA Start DefineRobot Start DefineOp Start DefineArch Start DefineType Start InstCoord Start InstBP Start InstRobot Start BindArch Start DefineSandA Start Agent DefineClass DefineBP InstAgent InstGroup InstSorA DefineRobot DefineOp DefineArch DefineType InstCoord InstBP Inst Robot BindArch DefineSandA Agent Agent AGENT_NAME ROBOT_NAME GROUP_NAME BP_NAME RefRobot RefGroup RefCoord RefSorA RefBP ClsRef COORD_NAMI q DefineArch defArch NAME BindArch bindArch ARCH_NAME bindArch NAME TypeSetArch defType ARCH_NAME defType NAME defType DefineType TypeSetArch NAME TypeSetArch TYPE_NAME DefineOp OpSetArch TYPE_NAME NAME FSA_STYLE EndDefop OpSetArch TYPE_NAME NAME SELECT_STYLE EndDefop EndDefop ParmDef Os OpSetArch defOp ARCH_NAME defOp DefineRob
54. via CfgEdit using TCP IP CBRServer returns appropriate mission plans to the CfgEdit after assembling them from the segments of the mission plans cases stored in the memory using case based reasoning The relationship between Mission Expert and CBRServer is shown in Figure 65 As shown in the figure interactions among mlab CfgEdit and CBRServer processes provide the functionality of Mission Expert The user would only interact with mlab and CfgEdit CBRServer consists of Memory Manager Planner and Domain Manager modules To generate a new mission Memory Manager module retrieves ballpark solutions based on the mission specs preferences and constraints provided by the user Planner module combines those solutions and adjust parameters to make it better fit to the current situation Domain Manager module translates the solution into a language that CfgEdit can understand Multiple solutions may be suggested to the users if applicable Each solution will be graded with its suitability rating or matchness of fit Once CfgEdit loads the solution FSA based mission plan the user may modify it if necessary If the user wishes Mission Expert can save a new mission plan into the memory See Section 3 10 4 below After the execution of the mission Mission Expert inquire the user feedback and it will be used to adjust the rating of the mission plan in the next cycle Map Based Mission Input Specifier mlab Requirements Preference
55. y diff The difference in meters of the Y position as defined by the GPS unit and as defined by the controlling application s coordinate system Default is 270 m_per_lat The number of meters per degree latitude Default is 110919 337 correct for Ga Tech campus m per long The number of meters per degree longitude Default is 92621 190 correct for Ga Tech campus 3 9 2 Command Line Arguments The followings are the command line arguments HServer can take If you run HServer with no arguments it starts up with no hardware connections Hardware can be then connected via keyboard commands C config_file Use this configuration file c camera_section Connect Sony EVI D30 camera described in the configuration file by camera section lt camera_section gt 1 laser_section Connect SICK LMS200 laser scanner described in the configuration file by laser section lt laser_section gt m cognachrome_section Connect Newton Cognachrome Vision System described by the configuration file in cognachrome section lt cognachrome_section gt n nomad_section Connect Nomad 150 or Nomad 200 described in the configuration file by nomad section lt nomad_section gt p pioneer_section Connect to a Pioneer AT described in the configuration file by pioneer section lt pioneer_section gt j Connect to an ATRV Jr via mobility u Connect to an RWI Urban Robot via mobility 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 94 v framegrabber_section g gps_s
56. you declare those in your Mission Lab home src libenl cnl inc Programming in CNL is explained in Section 3 6 and for details please read the separate manual Here let us use the existing MOVE_TO cnl the Move to goal behavior and SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES cnl the Swirl behavior that will be incorporated into our new state GoTo_with_Swirl If you choose to use the existing ones make sure that each CNL code has procedure Vector instead of procedure bool procedure Vector is for a state while procedure bool is for a trigger For example in SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES cnil the procedure is specified as procedure Vector SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES with 2 Declare Inputs to the Primitive Behaviors Once you decide which primitive behaviors to use you have to declare the inputs to those behaviors if they have not been declared in the de fault gen and default AuRA urban files The default gen and default AuRA urban files are for a generic robot and for the Autonomous Robotics Architecture AuRA robot respectively saved in the your MissionLab home src cdl_code directory and also linked from for the your Mission Lab home lib directory Since MOVE_TO cnl had been already used by the GoTo state you can find in default gen and default AuRA urban that the inputs for the behaviors are defined as In default gen defAgent displacement MOVE_TO bool
57. 0 Capture frame if the xwindow is open output to xwindow see below otherwise write to video_cap ppm Refresh screen Exit control menu This window is for displaying images captured by the video framegrabber This window will pop up by pressing X key from the main window Q Closes xwindow e Emulated Robot Control Menu The emulated robot Fred emulates the movement of an actual robot without actually running the hardware of those Event though it is similar to the MissionLab simulation capability the movement of the emulated robot is based on the kinematics of the Pioneer AT and Urban Robot hardware while the MissionLab simulation assumes that these robots are holonomic This window can pop up by pressing F from the main window d i Disconnect the emulated robot Initializes the emulated robot location to be to lt 5 5 gt and its heading to be 0 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 100 3 10 CBRServer and CBR Mission Planning Wizard Mission Expert 3 10 1 Overview CBRServer Case Based Reasoning Server is part of the CBR mission planning wizard we refer it here as Mission Expert that assists users to create a new mission plan based on past successful mission plans stored in the memory As shown in Figure 64 CBRServer serves as a mission plan database and a mission planning engine by running as a separate process The specification of the mission entered by a user using mlab will be sent to CBRServer
58. 100 y Af E EOD Area fend mexp endo 04032003 0 10748 E Figure 75 mlab showing the three robots executing the EOD task 106 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 107 3 10 4 Expert Menu in CfgEdit In CfgEdit you may find the Expert menu Figure 76 which can be used to invoke a few Mission Expert functionalities If this menu is shaded out check the DisableMissionExpert option in cfgeditrc where the option should be set as false Figure 76 Mission Expert menu in CfgEdit The first entry in this option is Create a New Mission Using Mission Expert By selecting this op tion you can build a new mission plan using Mission Expert as you did in Section 3 10 3 Make sure that CBRServer is started before selecting this option The second entry View the Map Based Mission with Mlab should be selected when you want to revisit the specs preferences and constraints you entered on the map using mlab The third entry is Add This Mission to CBR Library This option will send the current mission plan to CBRServer so that it can be saved as a new case It should be noted however that this option will not permanently store the mission plan in the CBR library file cbl In other words if you terminate the CBRServer process this mission plan will be erased If you wish to save this mission plan in a CBR library file permanently enter s key in the CBRServer window See Section
59. C gt robot executable At this point the GNU C Compiler gcc will compile the C code The hardware drivers library libhardware_drivers a and the primitive behavior library libenl a as well as other libraries in your MissionLab home lib directory will be also linked to the robot executable As soon as you finish compiling a robot executable you can run it with mlab If you left click the button in the left menu bar CfgEdit will invoke the mlab and the run dialog Figure 54 will ask you whether you want to run it as a simulation or run on a real robot via HServer The following are the options you can specify in the run dialog e Options for lt robot name gt This selection gives options to the users whether he or she wants to run the mission on a simulation labeled Simulated robot or a real robot labeled HServer These options are defined in the cfgeditrc file Section 3 4 1 e FTP Robot Executable If this check box is set cfgedit will attempt to ftp the robot executable over to the computer listed under Remote host computer before executing MissionLab With this option mlab will look for the robot executable in the directory specified as RemoteHostRobotDir in the cfgeditrc file on the remote machine then execute it In other words the robot executable has to be previously saved in that directory prior to execution CfgFdit is therefore equipped with the capability of transferring the binary
60. EARN coordinator in CfgEdit a QfileName and ActionTimeout have to be entered in the appropriate text boxes The QfileName specifies the file in which to save the Qtable Note that the filename has to have quotes around in when placed in the text box i e Qfile not Qfile The ActionTimeout is how many time steps the algorithm will wait for something to happen before updating the Qtable If the reinforcer state does not change or if the reward is not given before ActionTimeout in time steps have occurred then the algorithm will query the Qtable and update its memory An example configuration using the QLEARN coordinater is shown in Figure 53 The identical CDL file sample_qlean cdl can be found in your MissionLab home demo mars demos In this configuration the algorithm will be rewarded 10 points when it is Near mine AND Detect Flags To experiment run the robot with Forage ovl in the same directory 3 4 8 Analyzing and Compiling the Robot Executable Once you create a mission with the FSA diagram and if you are comfortable with it you can compile it to make a robot executable To compile it you can simply left click the Compile button in the left menu bar In order to check the feasibility of the real time running you have to have a version of MetaH a real time analysis program which was developed by Honeywell Inc for the DARPA sponsored Tactical Mobile Robotics project If you have Honeywell s MetaH you can invoke it by
61. Example Programs To check if your installation of MissionLab has been properly compiled you can run several demo programs that are included in the MissionLab package Here are two of those example programs that might help you to understand how mlab and CfgEdit work in the MissionLab system 2 2 1 Demo 1 mlab Run demo_marc and you should be able to observe what mlab MissionLab User Interface Console looks like Type the following commands Note marc stands for Manufacturing Research Center at Georgia Tech where our Mobile Robot Laboratory is tcsh or csh Make sure you are using C shell cd your MissionLab homel demos tmr_demos which mlab Make sure your MissionLab home bin is in your execution path demo_marc At this point if your screen pops up the mlab console Figure 2 and the robots start moving MissionLab is running successfully To quit the program click File in the menu bar and select Quit See Section 3 1 for more details on how to use MissionLab File Configure Command Options Compass Scale Olya 1 0m Hission area is 45 0m by 45 00 Pause Zoom 100 y a ay East Entry fa 361 Hobi a hobi Labia bi CIHS Lab Clearing Rooms Figure 2 Example scenario being executed in MissionLab 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 7 2 2 2 Demo 2 CfgEdit At this point you may also want to check to see if CfgEdit works properly in your n
62. Figure 11 If you click the Add Triggers button by mistake you can cancel this process by selecting Cancel in the Layout menu 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB Instance of FSA Figure 5 CfgEdit the third level Figure 6 CfgEdit the FSA diagram 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 10 rip 4 Level fans S ara marzo ama aaa Figure 7 CfgEdit adding a new state eeik ko EJE Figure 8 CfgEdit modifying the state 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 11 rip 4 Level start Over S AA SS marzo ama ma Figure 9 CfgEdit the GoTo state added ele lle o ELIE Figure 10 CfgEdit specifying a goal location 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 12 Figure 11 CfgEdit a trigger added e By repeating the procedures above add another GoTo state X 30 and Y 20 and connect the first GoTo state to this one with a trigger e The trigger connected between the first GoTo state and the second GoTo state should have automatically appeared as AtGoal and the value for the goal location should be automatically copied from the first GoTo state lt 10 20 gt Even though this is correct and you do not have to modify this trigger you can right click on it to see the rest of the triggers that are available Figure 12 If you want to modify the parameters for the trigger you can
63. Kind of Robot Figure 36 CfgEdit the second level with two robot configurations The information specified up to this point from the top level to the fourth level is stored in a CDL file This is in plain text format so you can view this file with any editor The details of CDL are explained in Section 3 5 To find out how each state and trigger is defined you may want to go to the fifth level by shift middle click while pressing the Shift key click the item with the middle button of the mouse Middle click the next box which has a label Move to the specified location and now you should see a figure of four boxes Figure 37 This figure shows that the GoTo state generates the heading by taking the summation of the vectors towards the goal location away from the obstacles and towards the direction the user specified using Telop By middle clicking any of the three Kind of Assemblage boxes for example the one for Move the robot to the goal in this case you can find that this vector was computed by the primitive behavior MOVE_TO or the Move to goal schema 1 after the goal location was defined Figure 38 The definition of the other states and triggers that can be obtained by shift middle clicking them at the FSA diagram the fourth level One thing you may want to note is that unlike the information you specified in the FSA diagram or above levels the definition of each state and trigger cann
64. LS 65 readings lt 10 81 gt List0f0bstacles lt 393 26 gt swirl obstacles 1 lt 66 36 gt Swirl obstacles Y DOR O OOOO COO GOGO OCIA IIA AK Again the parameters specified in the lines above SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES are pushed up from the previous COOP Those values are then carried inside SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES to match with its inputs that you declared in default gen and default AuRA urban 4 Experiment with the New State At this point you have completed adding the new state The following commands may help you to see if you have successfully implemented the state cd your MissionLab home mkdir test cd test cp your MissionLab home overlays Empty ovl cp your MissionLab home overlays BigObstacle ovl iptserver amp cfgedit Now create a back_and_forth robot as you did in Section 2 2 2 except that this time use the newly created GoTo_with Swirl state instead of the GoTo state If you left click a state in the FSA diagram you should see the GoTo_with_Swirl state in the list as it is shown in Figure 55 To pick the Goal_Location of the two points the robot is going back and forth you may want to use the Pick From Overlay feature pick the two points StartPlace and Goal in the BigObstacle ovl for example After you change move_to_location_gain to be 0 1 and swirl_obstacle_sphere to be 10 0 your mission will look like the one in
65. MissionLab User Manual for MissionLab version 6 0 Georgia Tech Mobile Robot Laboratory College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta GA 30332 E mail mlab cc gatech edu http www cc gatech edu ai robot lab April 6 2003 ii About This Manual Georgia Tech Mobile Robot Laboratory is directed by Ronald C Arkin This manual was created by the contributions of the following current and former Georgia Tech Mobile Robot Laboratory members listed in alphabetical order Khaled S Ali Tucker R Balch Jonathan M Cameron Zhong Chen Yoichiro Endo William C Halliburton Michael Kaess Zsolt Kira James B Lee Douglas C MacKenzie Eric B Martinson Ernest P Merrill Ananth Ranganathan Antonio Sgorbissa Alexander Stoytchev This manual was compiled by Yoichiro Endo 111 Copyright 1994 1997 1999 2003 Georgia Tech Research Corporation GTRC Atlanta Georgia 30332 0415 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This software may be modified copied and redistributed both within the recipient s organization and externally subject to the following restrictions a The recipient may not derive income for the Georgia Tech Research Corporation herein GTRC software itself b In any derivative works based on this software the recipient agrees to acknowledge GTRC c Any copies made of this software must be accompanied by the following copyright notice Copyright 1994 1997 1999 2003 Georgia Tech R
66. NLAB TOOLS 89 THIS IS PART 1 The scenario information SCENARIO Demo C SITE Demo B site Colorado ORIGIN X Y CONTROL MEASURES THIS STARTS PART 2 The control measure descriptions Boundary Yankee x1 y1 x2 y2 xn yn LDLC Echo xi yi x2 y2 xn yn AA Alpha x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3 xm yn ATK Bravo x1 yi x2 y2 x3 y3 xn yn PP Charlie x y Gap Delta x1 yi x2 y2 Axis Foxtrot x1 yl x2 y2 xn yn PL Gamma x1 yl x2 y2 xn yn BP 1 xi y1 x2 y2 xn yn BP 2 x1 yl x2 y2 xn yn OBJ Zulu x1 y1 x2 y2 xn yn OBSTACLE x1 yi 10 0 Figure 62 Sample Overlay Description File Obviously the x and y values would be replaced by actual numbers 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 90 3 9 HServer Hardware Server HServer provides a control interface to all the robot hardware and you can monitor and configure the hardware through this interface If you create a robot mission using CfgEdit Section 3 4 and wish to run it on a real robot the robot executable created using CfgEdit will serve as HClient and talk to HServer using IPT Section 4 1 HServer contains all the hardware drivers and can control the robot hardware exactly as the robot executable requested Thus the robot executable does not even need to know what type of robots it is running on Since HClient and HServer communicate each other through IPT the robot executable is not required to run on the same machine as HServer By separating the hardwar
67. NLAB TOOLS 58 cfgedit v5 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology Instance of QLEARN Instance of base Kind of Actuator v nax_vel base_vel cautious_vel me OfileNane ActionTimeout Instance of camera Kind of Actuator ET a oy Figure 51 CfgEdit QLEARN coordinator is connected to the Wheel Actuator icon be connected to the QLEARN coordinator at this level For example to connect a new trigger to be assembled by the reinforcer click on the Trigger button on the left select the trigger Figure 52 and place it in the workspace After clicking on the New button under the word triggers in the QLEARN coordinator link the arrow in the trigger and the arrow in the QLEARN coordinator tute of Technology triggers dialog_popup cautious_vel cautious_node Instance of canera Kind of Actuator Brook Figure 52 CfgEdit One of the triggers is selected Similarly a task that you wish it to be assembled by the reinforcer can be connected to society section of the QLEARN coordinator Clicking the Agent button on the left will popup the list of the tasks that can be used Please note that if you try to connect more than one identical tasks to the QLEARN coordinator it may produce a linking problem during the compilation In this case click on the task icon to allow importing it from the library 3 THE MISSIO
68. NLAB TOOLS 59 Each reinforcer lt state action reward gt tuple defines when the robot should be rewarded and by how much This state is not the FSA state being mentioned in the previous sections It is a binary state of the triggers Table 1 For example if there are three triggers InHallway Detect Enemy and Near Mine are connected to the QLEARN coordinator from bottom to top and only InHallway is true then the reinforcer state is 100 or 1 x 22 0 x 21 0 x 2 4 Thus since there are three triggers in this case there are 2 possible reinforcer states The action section of the reinforcer defines which task should the robot be using when that reinforcer state of the triggers occurs If the correct reinforcer state occurs but the wrong action task is being performed then the robot is not given the specified reward C B AJ State OO 0 O O 1 1 0 1 0 2 op1 1 3 1 0 0 4 1 0 1 5 1 1 0 6 1 1 1 7 Table 1 Given three triggers from top to bottom A B C the table shows the resulting state To add a reinforcer click on the New button below the word reinforcers It will create a new input point shown as an arrow Select Toggle input between constant and link from the Layout menu at the top and click on the new arrow This will convert the arrow into a text box Type in the desired tuple in the text box Finally to use the QL
69. ON Diamond Traveling Overwatch NE PL Gamma 06 10 94 23 10 f PASS PHASE LINE PL Gamma f 1 f 2 f 1 f 2 fer f 2 MOVETO BP 1 FORMATION Line Bounding Overwatch AND MOVETO BP 2 FORMATION Line Bounding Overwatch OCCUPY BP 1 FORMATION DIAMOND UNTIL TIMEOUT 10 AND OCCUPY BP 2 FORMATION DIAMOND UNTIL TIMEOUT 10 MOVETO OBJ Zulu FORMATION Line Bounding Overwatch AND MOVETO OBJ Zulu FORMATION Line Bounding Overwatch f OCCUPY OBJ Zulu FORMATION Diamond f STOP 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 85 3 8 ODL Overlay Description Language The Overlay Description Language describes the environment for display by mlab In order to read overlay information from files it is necessary to use an overlay description file format This section describes the structure and syntax of that format The end of the section contains an illustration of a sample overlay file in Figure 62 The file is organized into two parts 1 the scenario information part and 2 the control measure de scription part The basic syntax of the file is described in the following sections White space spaces tabs and blank lines is ignored Comments can be included on any line by using two dashes in a row the rest of the line is ignored NOTE In the following descriptions items in italics would be replaced by appropriate values from the user 3 8 1 Scenario Information Part The scenario information part is the first part of the file and includes any of the following items
70. ORMATION FN MT it PLS SPEED number In this case the destination must be a line The other components are the same as in the MOVETO command NOTE This command is not implemented yet in the robot executable e Occupy command This command tells the unit to occupy a position until some termination condi tion is satisfied It has the following form UNIT Unit name OCCUPY Destination name FORMATION FM UC Where the Destination name refers to the place to occupy The formation terms are the same as in the MOVETO command The final part is the optional termination condition Until Clause By default when the robots complete an occupy command get into formation at the specified location the console prompts the user to proceed with a proceed dialog box See Figure 61 When the user Proceed Unit scouts is occupying AA AAl Proceed PROCEED ABORT Figure 61 Proceed dialog box presses the Proceed button the commands continue executing from that point It may be convenient to specify a timeout for how long to wait for the user to press the Proceed button The form of the until clause UC is UNTIL TIMEOUT time The value time is the amount of time to wait before proceeding without confirmation If time is an integer number it is assumed to be the number of seconds to wait It can also be specified in terms of hours and minutes in the format mm ss or hh mm ss If a value of zero i
71. Robotics and Automation Atlanta GA May 1993 Vol 1 pp 678 685 Balch T and Arkin R C Communication in Reactive Multiagent Robotic Systems Autonomous Robots Vol 1 1994 pp 1 25 Fedor C TCX Task Communication User manual for TCX available through the Robotics Insti tute Carnegie Mellon University Feb 15 1993 Koenig S and Likhachev M Improved Fast Replanning for Robot Navigation in Unknown Terrain In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2002 Lee B and Hurson A R Dataflow Architectures and Multithreading IEEE Computer August 1994 pp 27 39 Lee J B Arkin R C Learning Momentum Integration and Experimentation Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation May 2001 pp 1975 1980 Likhachev M and Arkin R C Spatio Temporal Case Based Reasoning for Behavioral Selection Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation May 2001 pp 1627 1634 Likhachev M Kaess M and Arkin R C Learning Behavioral Parameterization Using Spatio Temporal Case Based Reasoning Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation May 2002 pp 1282 1289 REFERENCES 115 13 14 15 16 17 Lyons D M and Arbib M A A Formal Model of Computation for Sensory Based Robotics IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automati
72. SA diagram can be done at the fourth level of the configuration Figure 6 on page 9 When you first reach this level you find a Start state To add a new state left click the Add Tasks button located in the left menu bar move the pointer to the display area and left click again The default new state is a Stop state Figure 7 on page 10 You can modify this state by right clicking it and choose an appropriate state from the list that pops up The possible states you can choose from are AboutFace The robot faces in the opposite direction from the original Alert The robot alerts the user by sending a specified message The user will received the message by the pop up window on the mlab console and if specified by email AssistedGoTo The robot behaves as same as the GoTo state explained below as long as the robot is progressing towards the goal However if the robot is making no progress the robot behaves as same as the Telop state explained below so that the user can assist the robot moving towards the goal using the Teleautonomous Operation Telop This state is composed with a set of sub FSA states and triggers Start Immediate GoTo NoProgress Telop and TelopComplete ChangeMot Vector This task will increase decreases the values for the motivational vector variables See Section 3 2 10 ChangeRobotColor This task will change the display color of the robot in mlab EnterAleternateHallw
73. TOOLS 41 Read only agents AuRA urban Instance of COOP Kind of Assemblage Read only agents AuRA urban Goal _Location Sclasses Savoid_obstacle_sphere Zavoid_obstacle_safety Read only agents AuRA urban Kind of Asseublage Suax_sensor_range pushed up Zavoid_obstacle_sphere weight pushed up avoid_obstacle_safety pushed up pushed up uax_sensor_range pushed up En Read only agents AuRA urban Kind of Asseublage pushed up max_sensor_range pushed up classes Figure 37 CfgEdit the definition of the GoTo state Determine where the global goa wove to goal Read only agents AuRA urban Instance of HOVE_TO Kind of Asseublage Read only agents AuRA urban insted on son oe nad wl lean true have_a_goal EJ goal_rel_loc Figure 38 CfgEdit the definition of the Move the robot to the goal 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Tuuediate 3 ed Possible_Biohazard Detect Near Possible_Biohazard Possible Biohazard XX TestObject Biohazard TestPositive up 4 Level fans S ara ERA marzo ama laa Figure 39 CfgEdit a set of sub FSA states and triggers in the SurveyRoom state Figure 40 CfgEdit the CNL code for MOVE_TO behavior is popped up 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 43 3 4 4 Building a Mission Construction of a mission using the F
74. The first entry of the Configure menu Figure 19 is Obstacles and it invokes the obstacle creation dialog box Figure 20 This dialog box allows the user to populate the world with obstacles Thus when you are using MissionLab for simulating and experimenting for example with an obstacle avoidance behavior you might find this function to be useful The parts of the dialog box are as follows The three button Ok Apply and Cancel along the bottom have typical meanings An additional button Clear Obstacles allows the operator to delete all the obstacles When the parameters are satisfactory press the 0k button or the Apply button to generate a new field of obstacles The Ok button hides the dialog box while the Apply button leaves it up for further operations The Cancel button hides the dialog box without generating a new set of obstacles The top scale Obstacle Coverage controls what percent of the area is to be covered by obstacles Note that obstacles generated by this dialog box will not overlap The second and third scales from the top control the minimum and maximum size of the obstacles in meters The text field labeled Seed is the current value of the seed for the random number generator The user can enter a value into that field and tell the system to accept it by pressing the Accept button or by pr
75. _basket olean drop_can olean detect_can olean have_can er const int Put_can 4 const int Look_for_basket 3 const int Start 0 const int Look_for_can 1 const int Pick_up_can 2 int state Start body sw pend itch state case Look_for_basket if detect_basket state Put_can else if drop_can state Pick_up_can output agent_Look_for_basket break case Put_can state Look_for_can output agent_Put_can break case Look_for_can if detect_can state Pick_up_can output agent_Look_for_can break case Start state Look_for_can output agent_Start break case Pick_up_can if have_can state Look_for_basket else if drop_can state Look_for_can output agent_Pick_up_can break Figure 59 The CNL procedure definition generated to implement the trashbot configuration 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 76 node trashbot_FSA is trashbot_FSA_proc with agent_Look_for_basket Wander agent_Put_can NULL agent_Look_for_can Wander agent_Start NULL agent_Pick_up_can NULL detect_basket trig_detect_basket drop_can trig_drop_can detect_can trig_detect_can have_can trig_have_can nend node trig_detect_basket is DETECT_BASKET with nend node trig_drop_can is DROP_CAN with nend node trig_detect_can is DETECT_CAN with nend node trig_have_can is HAVE_CAN with nend node Wander is COOP with weight 1 0 weight 0 8 weight 1 0 members
76. ad of execution using the C threads package There exists the notion of a cycle where execution of each thread node occurs once and only once per cycle This guarantees that the data flowing between nodes is synchronized This means that within a single cycle a node will not execute until all of the nodes providing it with input values have executed Currently generated robot executables do not take advantage of multiple processors That would be a simple extension from the compiler standpoint but providing mechanisms for the designer to suggest groupings of nodes will require some thought Good choices of groupings are necessary to reduce inter nodal communication overhead 5 CURRENT LIMITATIONS OF MISSIONLAB 112 5 Current Limitations of MissionLab This is a preliminary version of the software and a number of features are not completely implemented The following list describes some of the known limitations e mlab halts immediately when the 3D mode is enabled e CfgEdit prints out several running warnings if it LessTif is used instead of Open Motif e If Run in the CfgEdit was selected it runs with mlab R option whose pop up window asks users to select an overlay to be used for the mission The default overlay which is automatically loaded before the pop up window asks is Empty ovl and this overlay has to be in the path cfgeditrc specified However currently users cannot choose multiple directories for
77. ady is set to be DEPLOY FIRST StartSubMission will make the robot to go to the designated location If SubMissionReady is set to be EXECUTE IMMEDIATELY the state immediately after SubMissionReady will be executed i e the robot will not go to the deployment position Upon storing the mission plan CBRServer will treat StartSubMission as a marker to indicate the break point of splitting the mission plan in useful pieces e Stop The robot stops moving e SurveyRoom As explained in the TaskExited section above SurveyRoom is an example of states with nested sub FSA states and triggers Figure 39 Assuming that the robot is in a room it looks for a possible object e g biohazard If the robot finds the possible biohazard it will conduct a test to identify whether the object is a real biohazard or not The robot will exit this task if the object was a real biohazard If the object was not a real biohazard the robot will keep looking for another possible biohazard The robot will also exit the task if it determines that there is no possible biohazard in the room In the MissionLab system the at the end of a state name like SurveyRoom or WanderRoom denotes that this state contains at least one TaskExited state in its nested sub FSA states and triggers and when the user chooses this state from the menu the TaskExited trigger will be automatically generated to match with the TaskExited e g see Figure 41 SurveyRoom is
78. al serious memory bugs when it attempts to load command files which may cause a crash The bug erupts when trying to execute a NEW ROBOT command without all the parameters listed There is a workaround specify the entire command line for the NEW ROBOT command e The flexibility of the command description language is limited e The CMDL command FOLLOW is not implemented yet in the robot program e Bounding overwatch and traveling overwatch are not implemented e Only a limited set of overlay control measures are implemented e Control measures must be manually laid out in the overlay description file e Some polyline control measures such as LD LC are currently drawn based only on the first and last points e Although phase lines can be given they are ignored in the execution of mission plans 6 It usually happens when you did not set the execution path to 6 FAQ TROUBLE SHOOTING 113 FAQ Trouble Shooting When I tried to compile MissionLab at first time I got this error message What was I doing wrong building the IPT libraries cd ipt src communications ipt configure unix LINUX vx install LINUX main LINUX mkdir cannot create directory net hri robot mission src ipt lib LINUX No such file or directory configure cd net hr1 robot mission src ipt lib No such file or directory mkdir cannot create directory net hri robot mission src ipt include ipt No such file or directory
79. allway This state is assembled by Move to goal Stay on path and Avoid static obstacles schemas 1 e PutInEOD The robot puts the object it is carrying into the EOD area e Reset World Given the specified overlay this task will terminates the current mission and restart it from the beginning It is useful for experiments that need to be repeated a number of times THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 48 e SetCameraTrackerMode The robot changes its tracking mode e SetRobotColorld This is an initialization state which sets the unique identifier the color of the robot for Line Of Sight behaviors states with the LOS prefix The color identifier which is assigned to each robot must correspond to the actual color of the robot since in simulation the vision system of the robot recognizes different teammates on the basis of their color This color can be set when running the mission from cfgedit or by modifying the CMDL file which is given as an input to the mlab command e Standby The robot stands by to proceed the mission after checking its motor The motor test failure will be notified to the user This state has nested sub FSA states See the description for the SurveyRoom task below regarding the notation e StartSubMission This task will start a segment of the mission that considered to be a sub mission Note it is not sub FSA This task should be used with SubMissionReady trigger as a pair If SubMissionRe
80. and or your MissionLab home overlays directory The full form is cfgedit vls c rcfile cdlfile All the arguments are optional The main argument cdifile or CDL file is the name of a file written in the Configuration Description Language CDL CfgEdit creates a CDL file when you save a mission with Save Configuration As from the file menu The CDL file have an extension of cdl The other options are for v The verbose mode This option will print out the modes you set up in the cfeeditrc file when you run CfgEdit 1 Turn on the debugging mode for the CDL parser This option will print out debugging information for the CDL parser yyparse CfgEdit uses this parser to process the CDL code in order to extract the information needed to generate CNL Configuration Network Language code This option and s option below are probably not very helpful to anyone but the developers s Enable debugging of the cdl code generator When you try to Compile a robot executable with CfgEdit at first the CDL code will be translated into CNL code by the cdl code gener ator This option prints out the debugging information during the translation process cfgeditrc Append the name U nD Oa c refile CfgEdit can also take another configuration file rather than of the configuration file written in same format as cfgeditrc after 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 39 3 4 3 Browsing the Configuration Tre
81. ange in meters are not considered 30 0 by the avoid robot schema navigation_formation_gain Weight applied to the formation behavior in navigate mode 1 0 navigation_move_to_goal_gain Weight applied to the move_to_goal behavior in navigate mode 0 8 navigation_noise_gain Weight applied to the noise behavior in navigate mode 0 1 navigation_success_radius Distance the robot can stray from the desired formation position 10 0 before a correcting force is applied in meters navigation swirl gain Weight applied to the swirl behavior in navigate mode 0 0 navigation_teleopt_gain Weight applied to the teleoperation behavior in navigate mode 1 0 occupy_avoid_obstacle_gain Weight applied to the avoid_obstacle behavior in occupy mode 1 5 occupy_avoid_robot_gain Weight applied to the avoid_robot behavior in occupy mode 2 0 occupy _avoid_robot_sphere Other robots beyond this range in meters are not considered 30 0 by the avoid robot schema in occupy mode occupy_avoid_robot_min range If the robot is within this range of another robot in meters 15 0 the repulsion vector from it is set at a maximum value when in occupy mode swirl_sphere The maximum distance that obstacles are reacted to by the swirl 1 0 behavior in meters swirl_safety_margin The minimum distance that obstacles must be from the robot 0 1 to be included in the swirl computation in meters swirl_open_space The minimum distance that must be clear in a particular direc 0
82. are generated randomly SET MAX OBSTACLE RADIUS number This allows the user to set the desired maximum obstacle radius when obstacles are generated randomly SET CYCLE DURATION number This allows the user to set the number of seconds each sense compute move cycle is supposed to take in simulation e Create Obstacles The following directive can be used to generate the field of non overlapping obsta cles randomly CREATE OBSTACLES The following command creates one obstacle at a specified position OBSTACLE x y diameter where the position x and y and diameter are all in meters No checking is done to make sure that these obstacles do not overlap other obstacles or robots e Print information Several types of information can be printed by including the following commands These commands are primarily for diagnostic use PRINT CONSOLE DB This causes the information in the console database to be printed out PRINT ROBOT INFO This causes the information about the defined robots to be printed out 3 7 2 Mission Command List Part The rest of the command description file is a list of steps composed of several commands to be executed This part of the file starts with the phrase COMMAND LIST This ends the mission background information part of the file The rest of the file is a series of descriptions of each step Each step description has the form Step name UNIT Unit name CMD additional information
83. at ODL can describe ODL is described later in this manual Section 3 8 Configuration Editor CfgEdit Mission Developer Operator Execution Compilation Configuration bes sans Language Code dis cdl ena Network Language ale y cnl GNUC comple gcc fom Robot Executable Simulation or User Interface Console mlab Hardware Server HServer Robot Hardware Figure 1 MissionLab Components the mission developer can create a mission for a robot or a group of robots with the Configuration Editor CfgEdit Once the mission is created it can be compiled as a robot executable which will give commands to the robot hardware or its embedded low level software via Hardware Server HServer The robot executable is executed by the User Interface Console mlab and mlab can be invoked by both CfgFdit and the operator mlab can also run a simulation before the actual real robot run 1 2 MissionLab Development History MissionLab is a product of ongoing work in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Tech which addresses several aspects of configuring and controlling teams of robots particularly in realistic military scenarios This work has been initially conducted under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA task Flexible Reactive Control for Multi Agent Robotic Systems in Hostile 1 WHAT ISMISSIONLAB 3 Environments
84. ay The robot enters an adjoining hallway using the docking behavior 1 The direction of the robot heading is chosen randomly after passage EnterRoom The robot enters a room through the nearest door using the docking behavior 1 It can be specified to enter the room through either an unmarked door or any door ExitTask This state is usually used in a sub FSA state For example the SurveyRoom state Figure 39 contains two ExitTasks to reflect the two conditions for the robot to finish the surveying room task one for when the robot did not find a biohazard in the room and the other one for when the biohazard was detected ExitTask takes a string to notify the main FSA When the string of the TaskExited trigger in the main FSA matches with the ExitTask s string as in Figure 41 the robot can move on to next state which the TaskExited trigger is pointing to Follow The robot follows either a friendly robot or an enemy robot GoThroughDoor The robot enters a nearest door it finds GoTo The robot moves to a location specified in X Y coordinates You can type in the location as well as pick them from an overlay If you left click the Pick from Overlay button mlab will pop up and ask you which overlay you want to use Once the overlay is selected you can left click a desired position and it will be automatically translated into the X Y coordinate As you can see from Figure 42 some states e g GoTo and MoveToward below have the option
85. be distinguished as it is in the room e Starting point This entry describes a starting location It has the format SP Name x y e Wall This entry indicates a wall object of the overlay It has the format Wall Name z y T2Y2 Ln Yn where the coordinates describe the line of the wall Each boundary entry describes one wall As in Boundary it is likely that several entries will be necessary since many scenarios have several walls This control measure is implemented with the obstacle functionality In other words the robots will avoid the walls as if they are obstacles Moreover when the robot is in the detect object mode any object which is located beyond this wall cannot be detected since the robot cannot see through the wall e Waypoint file This entry indicates the name of the waypoint file to be loaded The format is WAYPOINT FILE Name This line is usually added by mlab when the user chooses to save the overlay file after he or she creates waypoints The extension of the waypoint file is wpt and it contains the coordinates of waypoints described as the passage points PP Since the overlay parser expects this entry to be the last entry of control measures the user cannot write below this line 3 8 3 Example Overlay Description File To provide a more concrete feel for what an overlay description file might look like a sample file is shown in Figure 62 The file does not have the numbers specified 3 THE MISSIO
86. bots it serves as a sensor and actuator simulator from the point of view of the robot executable On mobile robots the actual sensors are used instead Details of mlab are described in Section 3 2 CfgEdit The Configuration Editor or CfgEdit is a graphical tool for building robot behaviors The designer can build complex control structures with the point and click of a mouse CfgEdit generates source code which when compiled can directly control a simulated or real robot Details on CfgEdit are provided in Section 3 4 cdl The cdl code generator translates the CDL Configuration Description Language which is gen erated by CfgEdit into CNL Configuration Network Language code In general users will not need to be concerned with CNL However because programming in CNL is very similar to programming in the C language advanced users may develop their own primitive behaviors and store them as a library and or write their own control programs without using CfgEdit CDL is explained in Section 3 5 and CNL is explained in Section 3 6 However for details on CNL please read the separate CNL manual cnl The cnl compiler compiles CNL code generated by the cdl code generator and produces C code Once this C coded is compiled with the GNU C Compiler gcc the compiled program or robot executable may now directly control a robot The cnl compiler is automatically invoked by CfgEdit when needed HServer HServer Hardware Server directl
87. ctor specifically the robots are shown as being as long in pixels as the Robot Length scale on the right indicates World Scale 100 a zoon Factor of nominal size 10 00 aid Robot length meters Ok Apply Cancel Figure 21 The world scale dialog box 3 2 6 Time Scale Dialog Box The time scale dialog box Figure 22 can be invoked by the third entry of the Configure menu Time The time scale dialog box allows the user to alter the speed at which the simulation executes The scale of the duration of each robot sense compute act cycle in seconds can be adjusted using the slider bar Note that this controls the simulated time taken per step not the actual CPU time required to execute it Cycle duration seconds per cycle ok Apply Figure 22 The time scale dialog box 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 22 3 2 7 Dynamically Changing the Environment MissionLab allows for dynamically changing the simulation environment via an environment file that describes what changes to make The file can either be specified by the E option on the command line or via the Change Environment option on the Configure menu before the mission has begun if mlab was started in the paused state An example of environmental file sample_ environmental_file can be found in demos mars_demos An environment file should consist of a list of the following sections STEP_COUNT count period a l
88. d or control a laser If there are no lasers connected Hserver assumes you want to add a laser and it begins asking for the information needed to do so Choose 2 to control a laser Hserver will present you with a list of connected lasers from which to choose Once you choose a laser you will be presented with the following menu d s c u I X Disconnect laser Stream laser readings over TCP IP start stop continual laser updates update laser readings Refresh screen Exit control menu e Cognachrome Control Menu This window handles the controls of Newton Cognachrome Vision System This window will pop up by pressing M key from the main window 0 2 t i lt gt S R c Set channel to train and view Train on center color Incremental train center Shrink grow colors Save Restore EPROM Toggle crosshairs Adjust filter level Level 0 recognizes objects one pixel wide Level 1 2 pixels Level 2 3 pixels Level 3 4 pixels Disconnect cognachrome Toggle color tracking Adjust object size used to calculate distance 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 99 x Exit control menu e Video Control Menu This window handles the controls of BT848 video framegrabber This window will pop up by pressing V key from the main window d 0 2 1 r X e X window Disconnect video Set channel to digitize Set capture size to 160x120 320x240 480x360 640x48
89. d using sphigs package Since there is only polygon representation of objects in sphigs and to simplify computation all objects are shown as squares the labels for the passage points are not shown to make the 3D views less crowded For the items listed in an overlay file passage points boundaries and objects are represented in the 3D views All other items are not supported at this moment The whole view is scaled at the x and y directions to make whole overlay area visible according to the MISSION AREA definition in the overlay file No modification is needed to the 2D overlay file Currently all objects have the same height and they are located on the same z plane In the future we will change the overlay definition to accommodate true 3D descriptions including the height of the object and the location of the object in the z direction Robot movement vectors will also be extended to 3D to enable the robot to navigate in a 3D world Also robot representation descriptions will be added to the overlay file to allow the user to define the shape of the robot 3This function is not supported by the current version of MissionLab 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 33 File Configure Command Options Compass Top room view y oa ap hs De iD ety SLE sang fh mg Side Toom vier View Figure 34 mlab the 3D Display 3 2 23 Help Menu The help menu located on the right end of the menu bar has two entries About and Copyright that each invoke
90. de Controls whether cautious_velocity is used in place of NO max_velocity Value should be YES or NO detect_obs_range Maximum range at which the detectors can sense obstacles in 30 meters formation_spacing Characteristic distance between robots in a formation in me 5 0 ters formation saturation length Distance in meters from the nominal formation position be 20 0 yond which the robot s maintain formation magnitude is set at maximum formation_dead_zone_radius Distance in meters from the nominal formation position at 5 0 which no further formation position correction is applied formation_slop This is how far out of position the robot may be yet still be 10 0 considered in formation in meters formation_default_trigger Distance in meters from the goal at which a default heading is 100 0 used for the formation reference instead of the goal heading max_velocity Normal top speed of the robot in meters sec 7 0 move_to_goal_success_radius How close the robot needs to be to the goal before declaring 5 0 success in meters navigation_avoid_obstacle_gain Weight applied to the avoid_obstacle behavior in navigate 1 5 mode navigation_avoid_robot_gain Weight applied to the avoid_robot behavior in navigate mode 2 0 navigation_avoid_robot_min_range If the robot is within this range of another robot in meters 15 0 the repulsion vector from it is set at a maximum value navigation_avoid_robot_sphere Other robots beyond this r
91. de and compile it to create a robot executable that can directly control a simulated or real robot 3 4 1 Setting Up the Environment The first thing to do in order to run CfgEdit is to modify the configuration file to suit to your environment You can find the configuration file cfgeditrc in your MissionLab home src cfgedit The symbolic link is pointed to this file also from your MissionLab home bin In the configuration file you have to change all the paths stated as net hr1 robot mission with your MissionLab home The following is a sample of the configuration file for CfgEdit which is included in the MissionLab package Make backup CDL files from the editor true or false backup_files false Show the values of the slider bars instead of the symbolic names ShowSliderValues True Hide the parameters for a state trigger of FSA in detail for default true or false HideStateTriggerParameters True Disable Path Planner true or false DisablePathPlanner false Disable Honeywell Real Time Analyzer true or false DisableHoneywellRTAnalyzer false Disable MissionExpert true or false DisableMissionExpert false Set the capabilities of the user Need Execute in order to run a configuration Need Modify in order to be able to modify parameters in a configuration Need Edit in order to be able to create or modify configurations Need Create in order to be able to create new compon
92. dentifies the robot as the base station or a robot in a safe area to which all information must be reported All robots belonging to a Visibility chain together with the yellow robot are turned into yellow robots They are turned back to their original color if the Visibility chain with the yellow robot is broken Currently this option can be used only in simulation 3 2 21 Compass Window Figure 33 is the compass window which can be invoked by Compass menu in the menu bar When a robot is running an arrow will show up in the circle area indicating the heading direction of the robot with respect to the compass direction This function works for both the simulation and the robot that supports a compass device Press End Compass to close the window End Compass Figure 33 Compass Window 3 2 22 3D Display Three dimensional views can be invoked in mlab to give the user a more realistic representation of the mission scenario The user enters the 3D mode by giving a 3 option on the command line 3D views of the layout include top view side view and front view The robot in the views is shown as a six legged robot Other objects in the views are shown as squares instead of circles as in the 2D view The 3D views are updated on every fifth 2D view update so the display will not slow down the simulation dramatically A snapshot of the 3D views is shown in Figure The 3D views are generate
93. dmark is specified on a separate line Each line contains two numbers x and y coordinates of the landmark and a string type of landmark or how the landmark is displayed on the screen The currently supported strings are SQ for square and PIE for a pie slice This is still an experimental section of the path planner and in this release landmarks are not taken into account when generating the path Here is an example of a map file The map that the planner generates from this file is shown in Figure 49 It differs from Figure 46 only by the obstacle in the middle of the room Also note how the number size and shape of the convex regions changes when the obstacle is added WALLS 32 3 75 85 85 3 16 2 3 17 1 67 17 3 17 3 16 2 TE ji ae PrPWWRROAaGKEH 40 0 18 95 3 75 18 95 OBSTACLES 3 15 0 11 0 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 56 15 0 9 0 16 0 8 0 OBSTACLES 0 LANDMARKS 7 34 0 6 5 SQ 13 0 15 1 SQ 14 0 14 1 SQ 38 5 18 0 PIE 15 5 12 0 PIE 8 5 17 3 PIE 28 5 17 5 PIE E A poo Ertamee Figure 49 Path Planner Window an obstacle exists in the middle of the room Contents of the points txt File Generated by the Planner File points txt 13 53 12 46 1 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 17 5 15 55 1 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 17 5 15 55 1 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 17 67 17 95 1 00 28 73 17 95 1 0 0 28 92 13 98 1 0 0 Each line describes one
94. e After invoking CfgEdit with the command above you will see the main window and a pop up window asking you to choose one of the three options New Robot Load Robot and Quit Figure 3 on Page 7 If you choose New Robot CfgEdit will load the configuration specified in cfeeditrc unless your version of MissionLab was installed with the Case Based Reasoning Mission Planning Wizard capability If you choose Load Robot CfgEdit will ask you to select a previously saved configuration CDL file You can also load a saved configuration from by selecting Open from the File menu from the menu bar on top of the window Choosing Quit will exit CfgEdit The first box you see in the window when you start CfgEdit Figure 4 on Page 8 is the top level of the configuration tree As you can see from the diagram in Figure 35 this level combines numbers of individual robot configurations as a group In other words CfgEdit is implemented with the capability of creation configuration compilation and execution of missions for multiple robots For example if you wish to create two robot executables which has the same mission and configuration go to the 2nd level by middle clicking the Kind of Assemblage box highlight the Kind of Robot box by left clicking it copy it by selecting Copy from the Edit menu in the menu bar and paste it by selecting Paste from same Edit menu No
95. e Telop Intertace ha et ok ee ea e Ea id ea oe ee a eee Personality Window is La ssa a e Bw FG pats ee A WAR AL de H Robot Trails ua ae RE ye ee ie a A a Sn ee EE ERA as ws ee Obstacle Highlighting pa cs aata o Rh be ee ee me eee d Movement Vector ic 22 2 2 ata e RA A ee we eee A SS Movement Field 2 saved eo oe 4 OS SS BO bh Ee eee eee ee Sensor Readings Display 0 0 2 eee ee ee ee ee DMA Ogden ae ed li ee he Bh ok gt Debug Options s 2 5 teow bho he eee SB eee Sa eee ee ee ee od aude We are es Show Line Of Sight e 4 2044 44 a ee ees ALORS PO CONTENTS y 3 3 3 4 3 5 3 6 3 7 3 8 3 9 3 10 3 2 2 l Compass Window bornes dear 32 eE AE n AEE meena de de EA EEE EE ee AA te 32 3 2 23 Help Meth aaa Ge ee ee ea eee E EE EAR ERS N 33 Robot Executables ya ge ra a PEEP REP Yee Ae a a a 34 CfgEdit Configuration Editor 2 0 a 35 3 4 1 Setting Up the Environment 20 020000202 eee 35 34 2 Running CfgEdit aa aae D a AAA Bae A A a eS AR a 38 3 4 3 Browsing the Configuration Tree e 39 Sad Buildine a MISSION cta pla e NAAA A A 43 3 4 5 Using Waypoints Tool 2 2 Vecino coc a a a A 51 3 4 6 Using Path Planning Tool e 51 3 4 7 Using Q Learning for a Behavioral Selection a 57 3 4 8 Analyzing and Compiling the Robot Executable 0 59 3 4 9 Executing the Robot Executable 0 2 00 002 ee eee 59 3 4 10 Addin
96. e dataflow graph s topography CNL encourages this separation by allowing the procedures to be coded tested and archived in standard Unix libraries Instances of these procedures are specified in a separate step thereby creating the dataflow network The output of the CNL compiler is a C file created by merging the user s procedures and the compiler s data movement code specified by the node definitions This output file can be compiled using any suitable ANSI C compiler targeted for the desired machine architecture Using a standard programming language for the procedures simplifies converting existing code to CNL The CNL language is documented in the Configuration Network Language User manual included with this MissionLab package The code in Figure 58 is an example of the CNL procedure definition for the avoid_static_obstacles behavior used in the trash collecting trashbot configuration There are four places that C code can occur in CNL Bracketed by an init iend pair bracketed by a once header pair within a procedure definition bracketed by a header body pair within a procedure definition or bracketed by a body pend pair within a procedure definition Code within init blocks is not specific to a particular procedure Code within once blocks is emitted before the body loop and therefore executes once on instantiation Code within the header block is executed once each time the thread gains scope For example a node underneath a state in
97. e drivers from the robot executable binary CfgEdit can compile the mission with less time and since HServer is multithreaded pthreads it provides the ability to block on serial reads If the hardware control was in the robot executable no blocking I O could be utilized Moreover for developers since HServer provides a standard framework for all the hardware drivers it minimizes the work needed to integrate new hardware into the existing system HServer can control the following hardware e ATRV Jr robot iRobot via TCP IP mobility required e Urban Robot iRobot via TCP IP mobility required e AmigoBot robot ActivMedia via a serial port e Pioneer AT robot ActivMedia via a serial port e EVI D30 camera Sony via a serial port e LMS200 Laser scanner SICK Optic Electronic via a serial port e Nomad 150 200 robot Nomadic Technologies Inc via a serial port or TCP IP e Cognachrome Vision System Newton Research Labs via a serial port e BT848 Video Framegrabber via dev video video0 e Novatel GPS system via a serial port e GPS base station via a serial port e DMU VGX Gyroscope Crossbow via TCP IP mobility required e C100 Compass KVH via TCP IP mobility required e X server via local or TCP IP 3 9 1 Configuration File HServer requires a configuration file to run The purpose of the configuration file is to identify the hardware settings and connectivity The configuration file is broken down into sect
98. e real power comes from using the Configuration Editor to graphically create and maintain configuration specified in CDL 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 73 3 6 CNL Configuration Network Language When the configuration is bound to the AuRA architecture the CDL compiler generates a Configuration Net work Language CNL specification of the configuration as its output CNL is a hybrid dataflow language 9 using large grain parallelism where the atomic units are arbitrary C functions CNL adds dataflow ex tensions to C which eliminate the need for users to include communication code A compiled extension to C was chosen to allow verification and meaningful error messages to assist casual C programmers in constructing behaviors The separation of the code generator from the CDL compiler permits incremental development and testing of the design tools as well as simplifying retargeting The use of communicating processing elements is similar to the Robot Schemas RS 13 architecture which is based on the port automata model The major differences are that RS uses synchronous communi cation while CNL is asynchronous to support multiprocessing and RS is an abstract language while a CNL compiler has been developed Both use the notion of functions using data arriving at input ports to compute an output value which is then available for use as inputs in other functions CNL provides a separation between procedure implementations and specification of th
99. ean have_a_goal location goal_rel_loc 5We used to use default AuRA and agents AuRA as our primary libraries in the past We are now mainly using default AuRA urban and agents AuRA urban which are refined version of the previous one and targeted for urban usage 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 63 In default AuRA urban defAgent AuRA urban binds MOVE_TO Vector MOVE_TO boolean have_a_goal Vector goal_rel_loc However since this is the first time that SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES cnI is to be used by any state we have to declare its inputs If you look at the SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES cnl file you will find that the Swirl behavior takes six inputs sphere safety_margin open_space open sphere readings and goal_rel_loc In SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES cnl procedure Vector SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES with double sphere double safety_margin double open_space double open_sphere obs_array readings Vector goal_rel_loc header body sphere and safety_margin are the maximum and the minimum distances in meters respectively that obstacles are reacted to by the swirl behavior open_space is the minimum distance in me ters that must be clear in a particular direction before it can be chosen as the heading by the swirl behavior open_sphere is the maximum distance in meters that obstacles are reacted to to deter mine the heading by the swirl beha
100. ection Connect BT848 Video Framegrabber described in the configuration file by framegrabber section lt framegrabber_section gt Connect to the GPS unit described in the configuration file by gps section lt gps_section gt Connect to a Crossbow DMU VGX gyroscope via mobility Connect to a KVH C100 compass via mobility HServer IPT name defaults to fred Display battery information Connect to an emulated robot fred Start IPT Set ipthost to lt hostname gt optional Connect to iptserver and listen for the connection with the HClient of the robot executable Setup IPT handler for multiple hservers Open X window no splash screen print usage and quit Note See the paragraph on Emulated Robot Control Menu below for more information on fred 3 9 3 Environment Variables For your convenience you can set the following variables in your environment HSERVER_USE_MLAB IPTHOST If this variable is set in your environment HServer will default to listening for HClient of the robot executable It is same as starting HServer with a option Hostname for IPT If this variable is not set it defaults to local host 3 9 4 User Interface and Key Commands e Main Window The main window is divided into two sections Figure 63 The top section are the status bars for the requested hardware These status bars indicate the current state of the hardware and other information The lower section of the main window
101. ee Section 3 2 for details on how to operate mlab 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 17 Menu Bar MissionLab v6 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology METE File Configure Command Options Compass Help Scale 0 14 100 0 m Mission area is 1000 0m by 101 Pause Zoom 100 y l Display area Scroll bar Figure 18 mlab MissionLab User Interface Console 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 18 3 2 mlab User Interface Console When the MissionLab program is run the user interface for displaying the scenario and controlling its operation pops up Figure 18 This user interface console is called mlab and it consists of the following four components e Menu bar The menu bar contains the menus for File Configure Command Options and y y bi p gt Compass e Scale bar The scale bar is underneath the menu bar It shows the scale by displaying a length legend It also has a display of the current value of the zoom factor the percent the display is scaled up from its nominal size On the right of the zoom factor value are two buttons Zoom out and ry Zoom in which can be used to zoom the map display area out and in For example when the display area is filled with detected obstacles you can press Refresh to clear them all The Pause button will allow you to stop the movement of a robot for both simulation and real robot cases e Display area The largest part of the user inter
102. emote Control Window This window provides capability of driving the robot or moving the camera manually Please note that when this window is up the commands from HClient MissionLab robot executable do not get received Thus make sure to pop down this window when you are running a mission created from CfgEdit This window will pop up by pressing F key from the main window The followings are the key commands you can use to control the robot and or camera i B w po B P lt space gt u O N Q OU ap s O c Move the robot forward Move the robot to the left Move the robot to the right Move the robot backward Lift the left arm of the robot Urban Robot Lift the right arm of the robot Urban Robot Increase the speed of the robot Decrease the speed of the robot Stop the robot movement Stop the linear motion of the robot but continue on the angular motion Stop the angular motion of the robot but continue on the linear motion Stop the movement of the robot arm Urban Robot Tilt the camera upward Pan the camera to the left Pan the camera to the right Tile the camera downward Set the camera angle to be its center position Zoom in the camera view Zoom out the camera view Increase the speed of the camera movement Decrease the speed of the camera movement 11 Note that because HServer uses ncurses there is an unavoidable delay associated with the escape character 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 97 t Tur
103. ents Need Library in order to be able to modify library components Need RealRobots in order to be able to run real robots Need MExpModifyCBRLib in order to be able to modify the library of the CBRServer user_privileges Execute Modify Edit Create RealRobots Library MExpModifyCBRLib Select which primitives are shown to the user List architectures here to restrict names to only those names occurring in all of the listed architectures The default is to show all names Architectures AuRA AuRA urban UGV restrict_names AuRA urban List of comma separated directories and root names of the 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS CDL description libraries to load Will try to load xxx gen xxx AuRA and xxx UGV CDL_libraries net hri robot mission lib default net hr1 robot mission lib agents Optional Configuration to load as the empty config DefaultConfiguration net hr1 robot mission lib FSA cdl DefaultConfiguration net hr1 robot mission lib default cdl Where to find the map overlays MapOverlays Default Overlay DefaultOverlay Empty ovl Default remote host DefaultHost cortez cc gatech edu Directory of the remote machine where the robot executable should be FTP ed to and executed from Note It only affects if you specified a machine name in the Remote host computer field of the run dialog RemoteHostRobotDir home demo The user name for executing the
104. environment in which the robot will be moving The file is a regular text file with format as described below The file has three sections walls obstacles and landmarks Each of the sections begins with a keyword and a number The keyword is just the name of the section in capital letters and the number specifies how many lines for this section follow Please note that the map file is similar to the overlay file but has different format This is dictated by the specifics of the path planner that requires that all points on the map are specified in counterclockwise direction for walls and clockwise direction for obstacles Walls should form a closed non intersecting polygon the same is true for every obstacle e WALLS The entries in the WALLS section specify points in the Cartesian plane which if connected form a closed polygonal contour The points have to be specified in counter clockwise order and must form a complete contour The first point should NOT be repeated at the end of the list OBSTACLES The entries in the OBSTACLES section are similar to the entries in the WALLS section but they have to be specified in clockwise fashion As before the first point should NOT be repeated at the end of the list The obstacles section specifies only one obstacle To add more obstacles define multiple obstacle sections and end with a line containing OBSTACLES 0 LANDMARKS The entries in the LANDMARKS section specify environment landmarks Each lan
105. eoperation On the bottom there is an on screen joystick which appears as a white circle with a dot in the center On the left of the joystick are controls that affect the use of the Telop interface The Immediate Effect and Delayed Effect toggle buttons control when an input to the joystick is seen by the robots In Immediate Effect mode any input is seen by the robots immediately In Delayed Effect mode the robots do not act on inputs until the Commit button is pressed Also the Select Coordinates toggle buttons allow the user to choose whether the vector added from teleoperation is in the robot s local coordinate system with the robot at the origin and the axes rotated or in the world coordinate system Note that there are two ways that the Telop interface can be used First if a command list is executing the Telop interface can be popped up at any time via the menus to override or direct the motion of all the robots Second if the user actually embeds a TELEOPERATE command in the list of commands then the Telop interface will pop up automatically and will only control the specified unit See the TELEOPERATE command on page 83 for details of the command syntax involved Either of these two events will cause the telop interface to pop up and resize the main MissionLab window to fit within the telop framework Once the interface appears the user can resize the main window or if done with the teleoperat
106. er gain avoid obstacle sphere of influence and wander persistence are continuously changed at mission run time using a Learning Momentum LM algorithm 3 10 The LM strategy implemented by default is ballooning Currently only one GoTo_LM state is supported per robot at one time If more than one GoTo_LM state is used the behavior is undefined To make alterations to the LM algorithm for example to switch to a squeezing strategy it is necessary to alter the source file mlab directory src hardware_drivers Imadjust c do a make all in the src or src hardware_drivers directory to re compile the hardware_drivers library and recompile the robot in cfgedit The most relevant part to change in Imadjust c is the table in the SetDefaultParams function The format of this array should be relatively straight forward having read and understood the LM papers 3 10 Future versions of MissionLab will have a new LM integration technique that will remove the single LM state limitation remove some of the requirements to re compile parts of MissionLab and allow for the user to specify the application of LM to many different types of states by altering CDL code or at a lower level CNL code during mission specification GoTo_MiNav The robot moves to the specified location while exploring the environment according to the MicroNavigation behaviors 15 In particular the robot can be in two states Avoid Obstacle and Follow Contour When in the
107. ere are a few miscellaneous options you can toggle from the Options menu Figure 29 The first one Show robot Trails can make robots leave a black trail on the screen as they move It is useful when you want to trace the points the robots go through A shortcut key Ctrl t or specifying set show trails on in a CMDL file will turn on off this option 3 2 14 Obstacle Highlighting The second entry Highlight repelling obstacles in the Options menu will turn on off the option for users to tell whether the robots are in the zone of influence and safety zone for each obstacle The zone of influence is the area where robots react with the obstacles and a blue circle will show up when the Highlight repelling obstacles option is on If the robots are in the safety zone inter robot collisions are assumed to occur and it will be indicated with a red circle You can turn on this option with a shortcut key Ctrl h or specifying set highlight repelling obstacles on in a CMDL file 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 29 Command Options Compass y Shou robot Trails ou 1000 0m Highlight repelling obstacles H Shou movenent vectors Y Ghee sovesent field Show obstacles Erase obstacles Learning Monentun Data Logging Debug Laser and sonar display Debug simulator D Debug robots R Show Line of sight Debug robot scheduler S Report current state VIF Is Figure 29 The options and debug menu 3 2 15 M
108. esearch Corporation All rights Reserved as well as the complete copyright notice file COPYRIGHT and d The recipient agrees to obey all U S Government restrictions governing redistribution or export of such information These restrictions may apply to redistribution within an international organization GTRC makes no war ranties or representations either expressed or implied with respect to the software contained herein its quality merchantability performance or fitness for a particular purpose In no event shall GTRC or its developers directors officers employees or affiliates be liable for direct incidental indirect special or con sequential damages including damages or loss of business profits business interruption loss of business information and the like resulting from any defect in this software or its documentation or arising out of the use or inability to use this software or accompanying documentation even if GTRC an authorized representative or a GTRC affiliate has been advised of the possibility of such damage GTRC makes no representation or warranty regarding the results obtainable through use of this software No oral or written information or advice given by GTRC its dealers distributors agents affiliates developers directors offi cers or employees shall create a warranty or in any way increase the scope of this warranty This software was developed with ARPA Grant number N00014 94 1 0215 and funded by DARPA
109. essing RETURN key with the focus in the seed text field The user can have the system generate a new random seed by pressing the Generate new seed button The user can also choose to have the software generate a new seed every time the Apply button is pressed by turning on the Auto Randomize toggle button 3 2 5 World Scale Dialog Box The second entry of the Configure menu is Scale which invokes the world scale dialog box Figure 21 The world scale dialog box allows the user to alter the scale of the display of the world The Ok Apply 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 21 Obstacle Creation Obstacle Coverage 2 00 T Min obstacle radius m 10 00 Le T Max obstacle radius m Seed 69135 Accept Generate new seed 4 Auto Randomize Cancel Clear Obstacles Figure 20 The obstacle creation dialog box and Cancel buttons have their typical meanings The scale at the top controls the zoom factor used to display the map area This value is also controlled by the zoom in and zoom out buttons just below the right end of the menu bar The Scale Robots toggle controls whether the size of the displayed robots is to be scaled with the world If it is on the robots are shown as being as long in meters as the Robot Length scale on the right indicates If it is off the robots are shown at a fixed size regardless of the zoom fa
110. et hri robot mission include ldflags parm passed to C compiler ldflags L net hr1 robot mission lib lcthreads CNL_LIBS lhardware_drivers lipt lstdc 1m lqlearn Eo RkKKKKKKKEKK Real robot configuration flags FR k k k kk k kk kk k k ak ok k The list of real robots we know about robots HServer 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 38 Any misc robot settings that will be dumped to the script file MiscRobotSettings set show trails on set scale robots on set ROBOT LENGTH 0 5 Any list of strings attached to the robot name will be appended to the startup parameters for that robot The robot names are case sensitive HServer robot_type HSERVER danger_range 1 0 compass_type NOCOMPASS use_reverse 0 draw_obstacles 1 lurch_mode 0 Wait_for_turn 0 drive_wait_angle 90 adjust_obstacles 1 use_sonar 1 use_laser 1 use_cognachrome 1 Wait_for_ack 0 multiple_hservers 0 3 4 2 Running CfgyEdit CfgEdit can also take several optional arguments Before you run CfgEdit make sure you are running iptserver Section 3 1 and Empty ovl or another default overlay file you specified in the line Default Overlay of your configuration file is in the directory from where you will run the CfgEdit from so that when you run mlab within CfgEdit it will run properly You can find Empty ovl in your Mission Lab home demos mars demos
111. ew installation After making sure you set up the CfgEdit environment according to the instructions in Section 2 1 follow these steps to create a back_and_forth robot using CfgEdit 1 Go to an appropriate directory e In the directory you are going to run CfgEdit make sure that there is Empty ovl You need this to load the default overlay when you invoke mlab from CfgEdit cd your MissionLab home demos mars_demos 1s Empty ovl 2 Run iptserver e You must be running iptserver when the CfgEdit invokes mlab Read Section 3 1 for the explana tion iptserver amp 3 Run CfgEdit e Ifyou launch CfgEdit with the following command its window Figure 3 will pop up on the screen cfgedit LA Figure 3 CfgEdit Window 4 Move to a FSA diagram 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 8 Choosing New Robot from the first selection If your MissionLab was installed without the CBR Mission Planning Wizard functionality Mission Expert CfyEdit will show the top level of the configuration as shown in Figure 4 If Mission Expert is installed CfgEdit asks you whether to use it Select No to the question and you will see the top level of the configuration Kind of Asseublage Figure 4 CfgEdit the top level Click the box labeled with Kind of Assemblage under the heading Group of Robots with the middle button o
112. f the mouse middle click If you middle click again in the box for Instance of PIONEERAT you will see the display like the one in Figure 5 By middle clicking the box for Instance of FSA under The State Machine you can reach the Finite State Acceptor FSA diagram window Figure 6 5 Constructing a Back_and_Forth Robot At this moment you should see a circle labeled Start Figure 6 This circle indicates the robot s start state Now you will add its first GoTo state by left clicking the Add Tasks button located in the left menu bar Move the pointer into the display area and left click again You will see a new state whose default is Stop Figure 7 In order to modify the state into another state right click the Stop state and choose GoTo left click from the list Figure 8 Make sure you have created the new GoTo state as it is shown in Figure 9 and change the goal location by middle clicking the state Type in a goal location in the world coordinate for example to be X 10 and Y 20 Figure 10 Now in order for the robot to have a transition from one state to another you need to add a trigger Left click the Add Triggers button located in the left menu bar press down the left button of the mouse in the Start state drag the arrow to the GoTo state and release it You will find a trigger connected between those two states
113. f the sub FSA whose message string matches with the one specified for this trigger TelopComplete The transition occurs when the Telop window is closed TestNegative The transition occurs when the result of the TestObject state explained above is negative TestPositive The transition occurs when the result of the TestObject state explained above is positive ThroughDoorway The transition occurs when the robot passes through a doorway UnmarkedDoorway The transition occurs when the nearest doorway has been unmarked Wait The transition occurs when the timer expires For building the mission all the edit functions Copy Duplicate Cut and Paste in the Edit menu are supported by CfgEdit However the Delete function is not yet implemented and Cut may cause a problem when it is used as a substitution of Delete In other words please note that all the items that are Cut have to be pasted somewhere in order for the robot to behave properly If you make a mistake during the construction of the robot mission and you wish to start over left click Start Over button located on the left menu bar CfgEdit will then clear the entire mission and start a new configuration without killing its process 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 51 3 4 5 Using Waypoints Tool If you want to create a robot mission in which the robot navigates the environment via a sequence of points you mi
114. face is the display area in its center The operational area is shown in this area e Scroll bars On the lower right and bottom edges of the user interface are the scroll bars for scrolling around the display area In this section the usage of mlab is explained 3 2 1 mlab Command Line Arguments mlab can take several optional arguments The full form of the form is mlab X opts CcdhLRrSX3 p psnfile s seed H height I hostname W width filename n All of the arguments are optional The main argument filename is the name of a command description CMDL file to load as part of the startup process The other options do the following X opts Various X Windows options can be specified such as geometry See the documentation for X for details man X C Forces a color map to be displayed c Tells MissionLab to expose the command panel after starting Note that this may not work properly in some cases with some window managers If the window comes up highly compressed restart mlab without this option and access the command panel using the menus d Turns on the debugging mode This option generates extensive diagnostic printouts which are probably not very helpful to anyone but the developers E filename Tells MissionLab to use filename to change the simulation environment at run time See the section on Dynamically Changing the Environment H height Allows the user to specify the height in pixels of
115. g New States and Triggers ee eee 62 34 11 Using Mission Expert aro a ee a SS 67 CDL Configuration Description Language a 68 CNL Configuration Network Language 2 2 ee 73 CMDL Command Description Language ooo e TT 3 7 1 Mission background information part oo soaa a 77 3 7 2 Mission Command List Part aoaaa en 81 3 7 3 Example Command Description File aoaaa 2 020000 004 84 ODL Overlay Description Language ooo a 85 3 8 1 Scenario Information Part coe ee RAE Re ee da aaa ee 85 3 8 2 Control Measure Description Part o 86 3 8 3 Example Overlay Description File o e 88 HServer Hardware Server ee ee 90 3 9 1 Configuration Biles 6 2 8 6 42 a ae a RR a alae AE apo 90 3 9 2 Command Line Arguments ae aaaea a a G a ee 93 3 9 3 lt Environment Variables ia af AAA Sees Se FI BS 94 3 9 4 User Interface and Key Commands 2 000000 0 00000 94 CBRServer and CBR Mission Planning Wizard Mission Expert 100 AS A E ees Ged a lt At BAe ek ot ot 100 3 10 2 Invoking CBR Server ios Ghb t eS EERE Bw eRe a ee BEE we es 100 CONTENTS vi 3 10 3 Creating an Example Mission Using Mission Expert o 102 3 10 4 Expert Menu in CfgHdit 2 ee 107 3 10 5 Customizing Preference and Constraint Sets and Toolbox 107 4 Support Software 111 4 1 Communications Software IPT ee
116. gEdit are explained in Section 3 4 The other method to create the robot executable is by programming in CNL manu ally robot your MissionLab home src robot mlab 2 0 robot robot and tmr_robot 1998 your Mission Lab home src robot tmr_robot 1998 tmr_robot 1998 are examples of this manually coded type robot The main difference between those two types is that the CfgEdit type contains the entire mission of the robot in its program In other words a mission from the start state to the final stop state or terminate state and their triggers that invoke the state transitions are all encoded in the executable file before it is executed On the other hand the manually coded type robot does not contain information about the entire mission The state transitions of robots rely on commands described in a command description file CMDL file of mlab or inputs from the mlab Command Interface The manually coded type robot is implemented with a set of behaviors for moving to a specified location and occupying a position A group of these robots can use several formation behaviors such as line formation column formation diamond formation wedge formation and no formation 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 35 3 4 CfgEdit Configuration Editor As you have observed with the demo program in Section 2 2 2 Cfgedit or the Configuration Editor is a graphical tool for building a mission with a set of robot behaviors It can then translate the mission as source co
117. ght find this Waypoints tool useful This function can be invoked by the Waypoints button located on the left side of the screen during the construction of a FSA mission This waypoint function converts the mlab console into the waypoints creation mode After choosing an appropriate overlay from the menu waypoints can be selected by just clicking the left mouse button on the window Figure 43 Middle clicking will allow you to delete an added waypoint when it was created by mistake and right clicking exits mlab s waypoint mode If you wish you can save the waypoints in an overlay file An example constructed FSA with the waypoints tool and the executed waypoints mission are shown in Figure 44 and 45 respectively File Configure Command Options Compass Y de Figure 43 mlab adding waypoints 3 4 6 Using Path Planning Tool In addition to the waypoint specification functionality described in Section 3 4 5 CfgEdit allows users to take advantage of a full scale path planner when specifying missions Path Planner The path planner is a separate program invoked from CfgEdit when users press the Path Plan button located on the left side of the screen Pressing the button opens a separate window that displays a map Figure 46 The user must specify a start and end position for the robot by left clicking on the map The planner then constructs a path between these two points The user has the option of cons
118. h the trigger is pointed Figure 11 in Page 12 To connect two states left click the Add Triggers button located on the left menu bar press down the left button of the mouse on the state where you want to have the transition from when the condition is satisfied drag the arrow to the next state and release it The modification of triggers is done in the same manner as for the states above You can choose the triggers from AboutFaceCompleted The transition occurs when the robot faces in the opposite direction Alerted The transition occurs when the alert message has sent AtDoorway The transition occurs when the robot detects a doorway AtEndOfHall The transition occurs when the robot reaches the end of the hallway AtGoal The transition occurs when the robot is at the specified location You can also specified a tolerance of which how far the robot can be off from the goal location AtGoalInFormation The transition occurs when a group of robots is at the specified location and forming a specified formation AtOrSkipGoal The transition occurs when the robot is at goal or asked to skip goal by the user AwayFrom The transition occurs when the robot is away from specified objects ClearFlag The transition occurs immediately and this trigger clears the named flag to false Detect The transition occurs when the robot detects the object specified Detect AlternateHallway The transition occurs when the robot detec
119. he avoid obstacle behavior is substituted by the swirl behavior GotoOutdoorNavigation The robot moves to the specified location with a swirling motion while avoiding obstacles GotoSoundSource The robot moves in the direction of the sound source GotoAvoidPast The robot moves to the specified location while being repulsed by locations which it has already visited 5 This allows the robot to explore the environment by escaping from local minima In particular the robot stores in memory a map of the environment a two dimensional grid where visited and unvisited locations are assigned different values as the robot visits an area more times the value of the corresponding cells in the grid increases and consequently the repulsive force exerted by the cells increases as well In addition to the parameters of the GoTo state the parameters you can modify are the gain for the avoid the past behavior avoid_past_gain the number of cells around the robot that are considered when computing the repulsive force avoid_past_horizon correspond to the side of a square area centered on the robot the number of cells around the robot that are marked as visited locations at each computation step avoid_past_mark correspond to the side of a square area centered on the robot the dimension of the grid that the robot stores in its memory avoid_past_grid_size correspond to the side of a square area Consider that whenever the robot exits the grid a ne
120. he file is loaded when the Load File button on the right is pressed or when the RETURN key is pressed while the focus is in the File text field The functions of the buttons in the lower part of this area are explained below The third area from the top is the command display area The top part of it is where executing steps are displayed The lower part shows the next command to be executed If the set of commands in the step display is larger than the display window the user can browse through it using the scroll bars on the right 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 24 The control buttons in the bottom part of the command list execution area have the following functions If the Execute Commands button is pressed the list of commands is automatically executed This is the primary mode of operation A secondary mode of operation is to single step through the list of commands using the Single Step buttons The rest of the buttons have the following functions Rewind Commands Rewind the list of commands This cannot be invoked if commands are executing automatically lt Move backwards through the list of steps If commands are executing automatically the command list backs up and the new command is executed If the commands are not executing automatically and a single step is executing the command list backs up but the new command is not executed If no commands are execut
121. he planner or the freedom given to the reactive control by the planner A small value for this parameter which is an angle with unit in degrees causes the planner to remain in control most of the time while a large value leaves the reactive control in charge The Dstar_persistence parameter determines the inertia of the planner The planner is activated only N cycles after the condition for its activation becomes true and then only when the condition is still true after the N cycles where N is the value of the Dstar_persistence parameter The behavior of the system when the Dstar_persistence is set to zero is undefined Upon successful completion of a mission the behavior outputs a map in the file named dstar map in the same directory as the robot executable This map is a text file where each character represents a grid cell During any run the behavior first determines if this file exists and loads it as an initial map if so This file has to be deleted if another mission is to be run on a different overlay Future releases of Missionlab will include the capability of creating a map for D Lite directly from an overlay A feature that determines if the map in the directory corresponds to the current environment will also be included 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 46 GoTo_LM This behavior is an alteration of the GoTo state Instead of using static values for the state parameters the move to goal gain avoid obstacle gain wand
122. he recent focus of our research DARPA MARS is addition of a framework to MissionLab that en ables robots to synthesize the desirable features and capabilities of both deliberative symbol mediated and reactive sensor mediated control The research involves 1 Planning with incomplete information 2 The use of case based reasoning CBR methods for situation dependent behavioral gain and assemblage switching at the reactive level of execution 3 The use of CBR for reasoning in Finite State Automata FSA plan generation through the use of wizards to guide high level deliberative planning 4 Specialized reinforcement learning methods learning momentum to adjust behavior gains at run time and 5 The integration of Q learning methods for behavioral assemblage selection at a level above gain adjustment The features for 4 and 5 were included in version 5 0 and 1 2 and 3 are now included in this version 6 0 of MissionLab 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 4 2 Getting Started with MissionLab 2 1 Installing MissionLab Please go through the following steps to compile and install MissionLab on your system 1 Make sure you have an enough disk space 200 MB Minimum 2 Ensure you have the required software We have compiled MissionLab with the following op erating system and support software It will probably compile with later releases but minor changes might be necessary e RedHat Linux 7 x or 8 0 e GNU gcc
123. ight Turning on the Show Line Of Sight option enables the graphic visualization of Visibility chains composed of robots belonging to a co operating team First we remind the notion of Visibility a robot A can see a robot B and vice versa if the line segment that joins A and B lies completely in the free space Next we introduce a transitive property in the definition of Visibility if robot A can see robot B and robot B can see a third robot C we say that A can see robot C The notion of Visibility is very important in many multi robot applications whenever we ask robot to accomplish missions in an unknown potentially hostile environment where standard radio communication is not possible and only line of sight communication is allowed 17 A Visibility chain is defined as a group of robots that can see each other and consequently communicate with each other according to the last definition of visibility that has been given the one with the transitive property Since the robots deployed in an unknown environment are often given the task of exploring it and reporting to a base station what they have discovered maintaining Visibility chains with the base station is very useful to quickly communicate what they have found during exploration In 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 32 order to visualize Visibility chains the user must create a robot whose color is yellow assigning the yellow color i
124. inates describe the polygon defining the region involved The last point is assumed to be connected to the first The optional value diameter in meters default 50m can be specified if only the coordinate of the center of the position is given then the position is assumed to be circular with the specified diameter If multiple coordinates are given for the border of the position any specified diameter will be ignored e Axis This entry indicates an axis of advance It has the format Axis Name 21 y 22 Yo fn Yn width where the coordinates describe the center line of the axis The optional final value is the width of the axis in meters it defaults to 100m if unspecified THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 87 e Battle position This entry indicates a battle position It has the format BP Name x y Y2Y2 Tn Yn diameter where the coordinates describe the polygon defining the region involved The last point is assumed to be connected to the first The optional value diameter in meters default 50m can be specified if only the coordinate of the center of the position is given then the position is assumed to be circular with the specified diameter If multiple coordinates are given for the border of the position any specified diameter will be ignored e Boundary This entry indicates one of the boundaries in the scenario It has the format Boundary Name 11 Y T2 Ya wes Tn Yn where the coordinates describe the line of the boundary Each
125. ing ROBOT echo_tty For debugging purposes the device driver can be made to echo all robot communications to stdout The value should be either YES or NO NO log_tty For debugging purposes the device driver can be made to log all robot communications to a file named tty log The value should be either YES or NO NO draw_obstacles Only valid when running a real robot It causes the robot to report obstacle sensor readings back the simulation where they are drawn as filled circles The value should be either YES or NO YES lurch_mode Only valid when running a real robot It causes the robot to halt after each control loop cycle Normally the controller com mands velocities to the robot allowing the robot to continue on between control loops When in lurch mode the robot is commanded to move to a series of discreet destinations This is a safer mode of execution when there is a chance the control loop might die since the robot will stop after the end of a move instead of rolling on with nothing in control The value should be either YES or NO NO Table 4 Robot definition parameter keywords for REAL robot execution SET DEBUG ROBOTS ON OFF If set ON the robots will print diagnostic information as they run This information will probably be most useful for the software developers SET DEBUG SIMULATOR ON OFF If set ON the console will print diagnostic inf
126. ing the command list backs up without executing the new command gt Similar to lt except that the command list is moved forward Execute Commands Execute the list of commands automatically starting with the command shown in the Next Step display window Note that the first command is usually a START start command It is an error to start with other commands such as MOVETO without starting the robots first Single Step Execute the next command in the command list If commands are executing automatically this is similar to the gt button Single Step Robots When the robots are paused they can be single stepped by using this button Each press of this button causes the robots to go through one sense move cycle Pause Pause the motion of the robots The button then changes to Resume Press it again to let the robots resume their motion ABORT Abort the execution of the current list of commands delete the robots and rewind the command list 3 2 9 Sound Simulation MissionLab has the capability to simulate sound sources The interface to simulate sound sources can be invoked from the Command menu and is called Sound Simulation It appears similar to the telop interface Section 3 2 11 To simulate a sound the user is required to click inside the white disk labeled Sound Source Figure 25 After the
127. ion the user may click the Close Telop button and the telop interface will disappear The user may also move around the two sections of the telop interface by pressing the ALT key while simultaneously clicking on the desired window and dragging it Finally there are two devices which can be used with the teleoperation interface a mouse or a real joystick The Select Hardware toggle buttons allow the user to choose which input device is being used Using a Mouse To depress the joystick in a particular direction move the mouse pointer to a position in the joystick and click the left mouse button A line is drawn from the center of the joystick to the position clicked to indicate the direction and amount that the joystick is depressed Notice in the figure that a line is drawn to the northwest This commands the robots to move towards the northwest The joystick remains 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 27 6 depressed until the user clicks in the joystick with the middle mouse button and then the return to the neutral position joystick will Using a Real Joystick In order to teleoperate the robot with a real joystick the main trigger button of the joystick must be pressed The Deadman Switch button will reflect whether the trigger button is pressed properly or not If it is not movement of the joystick will not result in any change in movement of the robot If the trigger is pressed then
128. ions each of which specifies possible connectivity settings for a particular piece of hardware such as a robot or peripheral device such as a laser The default file is hserverrc although an alternate file may be specified in the command line To find the configuration file the following places will be searched in the following order the current directory the user s home directory and the directories in the user s PATH environment variable When MissionLab is installed the default hserverrc file can be found in your MissionLab home src hardware_drivers hserver directory 10 HServer has to be compiled with iRobot s mobility by make hserver_mobility Because of the copyrights however mobility is not included in the MissionLab distribution See http www irobot com rwi for how to obtain mobility 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 91 The character denotes a comment Any text following the character up to the end of the line is ignored Other than comments the file is composed of sections with the following format lt start section type section name gt value name 1 value 1 value name 2 value 2 value name 3 value 3 value name n value n lt end gt Each section has a name section name which uniquely identifies that type of section All names of sections of the same type must be unique but if two sections are of different types they may have the same name Names may not ha
129. ist of actions where count is the step count at which a list of actions should be executed period is an optional whole number If it s present say it s value is P then the list of actions will be carried out again P steps into the future and again P steps after that and so on So the list of actions corresponding to this section will be carried out every count P x steps where x is a whole number a list of actions is one or more lines the STEP_COUNT section cannot be empty where each line specifies a different action to be carried out Right now obstacles can be created or destroyed either individually or in groups The currently available rules follow 1 To add a single obstacle at a given position with a given radius ADD OBSTACLE z y radius 2 To remove an obstacle at a given position REMOVE OBSTACLE z y 3 To add a group of obstacles randomly distributed within a region REGION x1 y1 2 y2 ADD OBSTACLE coverage min_rad maz_rad seed seed incl where x1 y1 and x2 y2 define the lower left and upper right corners of a rectangle This rectangle defines the region to be populated with obstacles coverage is a number between 0 and 100 that defines the percentage of the region to be covered min_rad and maz_rad are the min obstacle radius and the max obstacle radius respectively to use All obstacle radii will be uniformly distributed between these two numbers seed is an integer used to seed the random number generator
130. ly be invoked when the simulation is paused All vectors in the field are based 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 30 on a snapshot of sensor readings of the robot at it s current position whether running in simulation or on a real robot Also since the vectors in the field are generated by running the controller with the same sensor readings over and over again it is not recommended that this function be used with behaviors that are time dependent 3 2 17 Sensor Readings Display If you are running a mission on a real robot you might want to turn on Show obstacles in the Options menu which allows mlab to display objects that are perceived by the robot sensors If the mlab screen is filled with the objects and if you wish to erase them you can click on the Refresh button on the scale bar manually whenever you want to erase them or turn on the Erase obstacles option in the Options menu to automatically erase them after a specified period You can also change the shape of the sensor readings by selecting options from Laser and sonar display Figure 31 The followings are the alternative shapes supported by the option e Laser Display Normal The laser readings are transformed into the world coordinate and will be displayed around the robot display e Laser Display Linear The raw laser readings will be displayed as a graph X axis laser number from 0 to 361 Y axis distance from perceived objects at
131. m StartSorARef ParmSet from NAME ParmSet instAgent Loc NAMI instAgent Loc NAMI instAgent Loc NAMI instAgent Loc NAMI 00048 Glist Link Glist Link RobotLinks Agent Link RobotLink RobotLinks RobotLink LHS Agent LHS UP 70 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS LHS PU_INITIALIZER LHS Rule LHS INITIALIZER LHS LHS RobotLinks LHS PARM_NAME Loc PARM_NAME INDEX_NAME Loc PARM_NAME NAME Loc PARM_HEADER NAME Loc PARM_HEADER INDEX_NAME Loc PARM_HEADER PU_PARM_NAME Loc MaybeAgent Agent Rule if MaybeAgent goto INDEX_NAME if MaybeAgent goto NAME MaybeName INLINE_NAME StartClsRef MaybeName AGENT_CLASS ClsRef StartClsRef ParmSet Loc nstRobot StartRobotInst RobotParms StartRobotInst instRobot Loc NAME from ROBOT_CLASS nstCoord StartCoordInst ParmSet Start CoordInst instOp Loc NAME from COORD_CLASS RefRobot StartRefRobot RobotParms Loc StartRefRobot MaybeName ROBOT_CLASS RefCoord StartCoordRef ParmSet Loc StartCoordRef MaybeName COORD_CLASS RefSorA StartSorARef ParmSet Loc SorAclass ACTUATOR_CLASS SENSOR_CLASS StartSorARef MaybeName SorA Loc INLINE_NAME INLINE_NAME ACTUATOR_CLASS Loc INLINE_NAME INLINE_NAME SENSOR_CLASS Loc MaybeName SorAclass Loc StartSorAInst instActuator Loc NAME from ACTUATOR_CLASS instSensor Loc NAME from SENSOR_CLASS nstSorA StartSorAInst ParmSet RefBP MaybeName BP_CLASS ParmSet Loc nstBP
132. n on off the teleport mode when HServer is in the teleport mode i j P and k keys will relocate the robot position and u and o will reset its heading x Exit control menu e AmigoBot Pioneer AT Control Menu This window handles the miscellaneous controls of AmigoBot or Pioneer AT robot If Hserver is already connected to the robot this window will pop up by pressing R key from the main window If the robot is not already connected then first press R to get a menu to connect the robot d Disconnect the robot s Synch ab Sonar Type Supported by Pioneer AT only p Turn on off sonar sensors Speed Factor Decrement Increment Angular Speed Factor Decrement Increment r Refresh screen x Exit control menu e Nomad Control Menu This window handles the miscellaneous controls of Nomad 150 200 robot If Hserver is already connected to the Nomad this window will pop up by pressing R key from the main window If the Nomad is not already connected then first press R to get a menu to connect the robot d Disconnect Nomad s Range Start Change sonar sensor fire rate z Zero robot c Calibrate Compass Ping r Refresh screen x Exit control menu e ATRV Jr Urban Robot Control Menu This window handles the miscellaneous controls of ATRV Jr or Urban Robot If Hserver is already connected to the robot this window will pop up by pressing R key from the main window If the robot
133. ng has the advantage of enabling a compiled version of MissionLab to run on similar systems with slightly differing runtime libraries e g openwindows vs X11R6 Some distributions of linux only include shared libraries so static linking won t work 6 Compile Compile MissionLab with the following commands tcsh or csh Make sure you are using C shell important cd src make veryclean To ensure all old stuff is cleaned out configure cthreads To configure Cthreads you only need to run this once make depend This may generate numerous warnings that can be safely ignored make all This will begin the compile of the entire system 7 Set up your user environment Modify your tcshrc etc e Add your MissionLab home bin into your execution path It is not necessary to move the executable files to the bin directory because there are symbolic links from the bin directory to the executable files e Add into your execution path 8 Setup the CfgEdit environment If you are planning to use CfgEdit to create your own robot executables you may want to setup the environment for CfgEdit at this point Edit cfgeditrc in your MissionLab home src cfgedit In the file replace all net hr1 robot mission s with the full path of your MissionLab home At this point the installation is completed and you should be able to run the MissionLab system 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 6 2 2 Running Quick
134. ng the docking behavior 1 Localize The robot localizes its current position to be the specified values THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 47 e LookFor The robot moves back and forth until it sees the specified object This is another example of a state with nested sub FSA states and triggers It is composed with Start Immediate Move Forward MovedDistance AboutFace AboutFaceCompleted Wait Stops and Detect e Mark The robot marks the nearest object to be the specified object e MarkDoorway The robot marks the nearest doorway This state is useful when the user wants the robot not to go through the door it already went though once e MotivationalUpdate This task will update the values of the motivational variables of the robot so that the Motivational Vector interface can update the values of its sliders automatically See MOTI VATIONAL_UPDATE cnl for how the update rules are set up To make this task be executed all the time one needs to put it in a separate FSA like the way the camera FSA is being set up and make a loop in that FSA of the form Start gt Immediate gt Stop gt Wait gt MOTIVATIONAL_UPDATE e MoveAhead The robot moves to the compass direction specified by the user East 0 and North 90 e MoveAway The robot moves away from selected types of objects e MoveForward The robot moves in the direction it is currently facing e MovelInFormation A group of robots moves to a goal location in a s
135. o_with_Swirl Goal_Location 11 0 1 0 move_to_location_gain 1 0 swirl_obstacle_gain 1 0 swirl_obstacle_sphere 3 0 swirl_obstacle_safety_margin 0 5 swirl_obstacle_open_space 0 5 swirl_obstacle_open_sphere 0 5 COOP Goal_Location 7 classes 0 Will avoid everything swirl_obstacle_sphere 7 swirl_obstacle_safety_margin swirl_obstacle_open_space swirl_obstacle_open_sphere max_sensor_range 1000 members A lt 10 10 gt MoveToGoal members B lt 10 130 gt Swirl_Obstacles weight A Range_01 move_to_location_gain weight B Range_01 swirl_obstacle_gain lt 350 10 gt GoTo and Swirl lt 10 10 gt Move to the specified location with swirling obstacles Dakka Ek kk kk kkk kkk kkk kk kk kk kkk kkk k Notice that this assemblage is similar to the one defined in the GoTo state except that GoTo_with Swirl takes Swirl_Obstacles as the member B instead of Avoid_Obstacles and there is no STelop The sign in front of the function name indicates that this function is defined within the file and calls the corresponding primitive behavior For example if you look at agents gen or agents AuRA urban you will find the definition for MoveToGoal because its Move to goal behavior was being used by the GoTo state The weight for each behavior is specified by the line weigh
136. obots SentryRobot1 red robot_type HOLONOMIC run_type SIMULATION The extra robot s start position It has to be defined as PP If it is commented it will be treated as one of the multi robot i e having RobotStart_dx RobotStart_dy offsets ExtraRobotStartPlace SentryPost Offsets to start extra robots at This is for the 2nd and later extra robots The first extra robot won t be affected If these are uncommented RobotStart_dx and RobotStart_dy above will be used ExtraRobotStart_dx 1 ExtraRobotStart_dy 0 Whether to enable the robot data logging Not the usability or event log LogRobotData False Whether to show the current status of the robot when mlab is running ShowRobotStatus False Eo ekKKKKKKKAK CNL Architecture configuration FR OR k kk k kk kk 2k k ak ok OK Directories to look in for link libraries Seperate each path with a colon Newlines are allowed after the colon lib_paths net hr1 robot mission lib List of comma separated directories and root names of the CNL source files and libraries to load Will try to load libxxx a and include xxx inc as the cnl header file The editor will look for yyy cnl in these locations for each extern agent CNL_libraries net hri robot mission lib cnl directories to look in for CNL source files to display in the editor CNL_sources net hri robot mission src libcnl cflags parm passed to C compiler cflags g I n
137. ome bin directory where you should already have the execution path pointing to iptserver amp If you see an error like IPT Failure to create module listen socket most likely it means that iptserver is already running on the machine You can safely ignore the error It might be advantageous to run iptserver in a separate window since it generates output which does not usually need to be monitored If an iptserver process is already running note the host that it is running on If it is the host on which MissionLab is to be run no further preparation is necessary If not there are two ways to inform MissionLab where to locate the server The first is via an environment variable IPTHOST Suppose the communication server is running on host cartman cc gatech edu The following command will set the necessary environment variable setenv IPTHOST cartman cc gatech edu It may not be necessary to spell out the complete internet name of the host in this command The second way to specify the communications server host is via a command line argument which is explained later 2 MissionLab is now ready to be run Move to the appropriate directory and bring up the user interface console by running mlab mlab This should start the MissionLab program When the MissionLab program is run the user interface for displaying the scenario and controlling its operation pops up Figure 18 This user interface console is called mlab S
138. on Vol 5 No 3 June 1989 pp 280 293 MacKenzie D C and Arkin R C Formal Specification for Behavior Based Mobile Robots SPIE Mobile Robots VIII Boston MA November 1993 Piaggio M Sgorbissa A and Zaccaria R Micronavigation Proc Sixth Int Conf on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior SAB2000 Paris 2000 Schwan K et al A C Thread Library for Multiprocessors Georgia Tech Technical report GIT ICS 91 02 1991 Sgorbissa A and Arkin R C Local Navigation Strategies for a Team of Robots Georgia Tech Technical report GIT ICS 00 05 2000
139. operators Notice that the wander skill is specified using this method since it is used in both the look_for_can and look_for_basket states in the FSA bindArch AuRA urban instAgent drop_can from DETECT_LOST_CAN instAgent Denning_ultras from ultras ULTRASONICS instOp Wander from COOP weight A 1 0 weight B 0 8 weight C 1 0 members A noise NOISE persistence 5 0 robot_heading robot_heading GET_HEADING cur_pos denning_encoders xyt SHAFTENCODERS members B probe PROBE sphere 2 0 safety_margin 0 5 readings Denning_ultras members C avoid_obs AVOID_STATIC_OBSTACLES sphere 1 0 safety_margin 0 5 readings Denning_ultras RobotBP vehicle bound_to Stimpy MRV2 trashbot_FSA FSA society Start society Look_for_can Wander society Pick_up_can society Look_for_basket Wander society Put_can rules Start if true goto Look_for_can rules Look_for_can if detect_can DETECT_CAN goto Pick_up_can rules Pick_up_can if have_can DETECT_HAVE_CAN goto Look_for_basket rules Look_for_basket if detect_basket DETECT_BASKET goto Put_can rules Put_can if true goto Look_for_can rules Pick_up_can if drop_can goto Look_for_can rules Look_for_basket if drop_can goto Pick_up_can 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 69 The exact specification of the Configuration Description Language is defined below
140. ormation as commands are executed This informa tion will probably be most useful for the software developers SET DEBUG SCHEDULER ON OFF 80 If set ON the C Threads scheduler will print diagnostic information as it operates This informa tion will probably be most useful for the software developers SET ROBOT LENGTH length This allows the user to set the value of length of the robot If the robots are scaled see SET SCALE ROBOTS below then this length value is in meters If not the value length is the length of the robot in pixels This command should be placed after the overlay file command since the MISSION AREA command in the overlay file will override its effect Note that this only affects the display and does not affect the size of the robot for various computations such as avoiding obstacles SET SCALE ROBOTS ON OFF If set ON the robots are scaled magnified or shrunk with the map display SET ZOOM FACTOR zoom 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 81 where zoom is the desired display zoom factor in percent The default is 100 The minimum value is 10 and the maximum value is 400 Values beyond that range can be achieved by modifying the values in the MISSION AREA command in the overlay file SET OBSTACLE COVERAGE number This allows the user to set the desired value of the obstacle coverage in percent SET MIN OBSTACLE RADIUS number This allows the user to set the desired minimum obstacle radius when obstacles
141. ot RobotSetArch binds BP_CLASS NAME BPList RobotSetArch binds BP_CLASS NAME RobotSetArch defRobot ARCH_NAME defRobot 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS BPList BPparmdef DefineBP StartBP SensorSetArch StartSensor ActuatorSetArch StartActuator SandA DefineSandA DefineClass AgentSetArch StartClass ParmDef AParm SorA Loc InstAgent ParmSet Glist Robot Parms RobotLink RobotLinks Link BPList BPparmdef BPparmdef sensor INLINE_NAME SENSOR_CLASS actuator INLINE_NAME ACTUATOR_CLASS StartBP ParmDef StartBP defIBP TYPE_NAME NAME defIBP NAME NAME defOBP TYPE_NAME NAME defOBP NAME NAME defRBP NAME defSensor ARCH_NAME defSensor SensorSetArch binds BP_CLASS TYPE_NAME NAME SensorSetArch binds BP_CLASS NAME NAMI q defActuator ARCH_NAME defActuator ActuatorSetArch binds BP_CLASS TYPE_NAME NAME ActuatorSetArch binds BP_CLASS TYPE_NAME ACTUATOR_CLASS ActuatorSetArch binds BP_CLASS NAME StartSensor StartActuator SandA ParmDef SandA StartClass ParmDef StartClass defAgent ARCH_NAME defAgent AgentSetArch TYPE_NAME NAME AgentSetArch TYPE_NAME AGENT_CLASS ParmDef AParm AParm TYPE_NAME NAME const TYPE NAME NAME list TYPE_NAME NAME list const TYPE_NAME NAME ACTUATOR_NAME SENSOR_NAME i NUMBER NUMBER from AGENT_CLASS ParmSet from SorA ParmSet fro
142. ot be generally modified with the CfgEdit window unless you import it to your system These definitions are defined in your MissionLab home src cdl_code agents AuRA urban also linked from your MissionLab home lib not the CDL file that ends with cdl When you select to Compile the robot executable at first by default this agents AuRA urban file will be bound to the CDL file Some states however contain nested sub FSA states and triggers In other words a state is composed with a set of other states and triggers Figure 39 shows for example nested sub FSA states and triggers for the SurveyRoom state You can observe them by shift middle click the state once and middle click the next two boxes Even though the definition of the state with nested sub FSA states and triggers are defined in your MissionLab home src cdl_code agents AuRA urban you can rearrange those after importing them to your system Finally CfgEdit is also capable of showing how each primitive behavior is coded The primitive behaviors are written in CNL and stored in your MissionLab home src libenl directory as a library libeni a Upon compilation it will be linked to the robot executable For example to see the CNL code for the MOVE_TO behavior middle click the Instance of MOVE_TO box Figure 38 and the CNL code will pop up as shown in Figure 40 See Section 3 6 for details on CNL 3 THE MISSIONLAB
143. ot program and the optional list of key value pairs The key value pairs are parameters to send to the robot to customize its behavior The values should be quoted if they are strings with internal white space All of this key value parameter data is sent to the robot program s internal database after it has started executing Note If you try to set a value and it does not seem to have the desired effect double check the spelling of the key and make sure it is correct It is then up to the robot program to use the parameter data There is one robot defined by default Robot which cannot be redefined It is equivalent to the robot definition NEW ROBOT robot robot In the program cobot included in this release numerous parameters can be given which control the operation of the robot s motor behaviors See Table 2 for details A detailed description of motor 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 78 KEYWORD VALUE DESCRIPTION Default avoid_obstacle_sphere Maximum distance at which the avoid_obstacle behavior be 30 0 gins to react to obstacles in meters avoid_obstacle_safety_margin Distance at which inter robot collisions are assumed to occur in 5 0 meters base_velocity Adjusts the overall speed of the robot in meters sec 5 0 cautious_velocity The top speed of the robot when in cautious mode in me 7 0 ters sec cautious_mo
144. ote however that mlab uses the overlay file to run the mission and not the map file that was used by the planner How the Planner Works The code for the path planner can be described in six steps 1 Reads a description of the environment from a map file This file defines the position of the walls and obstacles in the environment The walls should form a closed polygon which we call the environment border The format of this file is described below 2 Before we do any form of path planning we have to apply some standard techniques from the robot motion planning literature We define a configuration space by shrinking the border by the radius of the robot From now on all operations are performed using the shrunk border only This is the reason why the displayed map Figure 46 may look strange 3 The result from Step 2 is a complex polygonal region To simplify the path planning task we partition this border into a set of convex polygonal regions This explains why the map on Figure 46 has lines across the rooms 4 The user is now prompted to specify start and end points for the robot path This is done by asking the user to click twice once for each point in the window displaying the map 5 The two points from Step 4 are passed as arguments to the path planning module and a path is constructed between them The path consists of a sequence of line segments connecting the start and end points The line segments do not cross the boundary
145. ovement Vector You can observe a heading direction of each robot by turning on the option Show movement vector in Options menu The heading direction will be displayed as a red arrow on each robot in the screen The shortcut key is Ctrl v and the CMDL file can take set show movement vectors on command also 3 2 16 Movement Field The Show movement field option in the Options menu is a useful tool that shows the potential field for a robot Selecting this option will open the Show movement field window Figure 30 pass Help Scale Ohu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n Refresh Resune Zoom 100 y Al B Distance to Field Edge meters 0 5 T pe Field Resolution meters Robot ID 1 gt Draw Field Stop Draving Close Home Figure 30 Movement field shown in mlab The Distance to Field Edge slider lets you dictate the size of the vector field which is a square centered on the robot for which the field is being drawn The Distance to Field Edge is the distance from the robot to the edge of the field in meters so one side of the vector field is actually twice this length The Field Resolution slider dictates the resolution of the grid on which the field is drawn To set which robot for which the field should be drawn use the Robot ID button to scroll through available robot IDs This function should on
146. pecified formation e MoveToward The robot moves to the closest object of a certain type e MoveToward LM This behavior is an alteration of the MoveToward state Similar to the GoTo_LM state instead of using static values for the state parameters the move to goal gain avoid obstacle gain wander gain avoid obstacle sphere of influence and wander persistence are continuously changed at mission run time using a Learning Momentum LM algorithm See the description for the GoTo_LM state above e Notify The robot sends a notification with a message pre specified by the user The message can be sent across different FSAs and is received by the Notified trigger by matching the message string It is useful when the user wants to create a mission which requires synchronization of two FSAs This message will not be however sent to different robots Use NotifyRobots explained below for communicating with other robots e NotifyGoals The robot notifies its goal position to other robots e NotifyRobots This state works similar to how Notify works explained above However in this state the robot can pass the message to other robots and received by the Notified trigger by matching the message string It is useful when the user wants to create a mission in which one robot sends commands to or synchronizes with other robots e PickUp The robot picks up nearest object specified by the user e ProceedAlongHallway The robot moves down the h
147. pilation 8 Running the Back_and_Forth Robot e Finally you can run this robot you just created Left click the Run button in the left menu bar and select Simulated robot default and left click the button Figure 16 e If the mlab console shows a robot going back and forth between two points like the one in Figure 17 congratulations you have successfully created the robot executable using CfgEdit 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB up 4 Level fans e A ara pS marzo Rca ama Figure 16 CfgEdit running mlab File Configure Command Options Compass Scale Oly 1 0 m Mission area is 45 0 by 45 08 Resume Zoom 100 al StartPlace PIONEER_Ful _Contig Figure 17 mlab running the back_and forth robot 15 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 16 3 The MissionLab Tools 3 1 Running MissionLab When you ran the quick demo program in the previous section you ran a script called demo in the directory to invoke mlab and other necessary programs to run MissionLab However to be able to utilize MissionLab functions you need to be able to run MissionLab manually Take the following steps to run MissionLab 1 First the communications server IPT or iptserver must be operating If iptserver is not already running on an accessible computer run the version supplied with the MissionLab package in the back ground You should be able to find iptserver in your MissionLab h
148. rameters Each of these parameters is then specified by a key base and inc line The key line indicates that the first of the two behavioral parameters affected by this slider bar is identified in the robots database by the key navigation_move_to_goal_gain The base line indicates that the base value for this behavioral parameter is 0 8 Each parameter can be adjusted in the range from 0 to two times the base value When the personality slider is at the 50 value then the behavioral parameter will be at the base value The inc line indicates that the first behavioral parameter will be increased as the personality trait is increased The value of 1 in this line indicates that the behavioral parameter will be set at 0 when the slider bar is at the 0 value and twice the base value when the slider bar is at the 100 value A value of 0 in this line would indicate that the parameter would be decreased as the value of the personality trait is increased thereby taking a value of twice the base value when the slider bar is at the 0 value and 0 when the slider bar is at the 100 value Similarly the key base inc lines indicate that the second of the two behavioral parameters controlled by this slider bar has a key value of navigation_avoid_obstacle_gain a base value of 1 5 and should be decreased as the personality trait is increased The next group of lines gives similar information for the wanderlust personality trait 3 2 13 Robot Trails Th
149. ro is assumed for x and y e Zoom factor This entry allows the user to change the extent to which the map is magnified or shrunk The format for the command is SET ZOOM FACTOR zoom Where zoom is the desired zoom factor in percent The default is 100 The minimum value is 10 and the maximum value is 400 Values beyond that range can be achieved by modifying the values in the MISSION AREA command This command should be placed after the MISSION AREA command if it is present 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 86 3 8 2 Control Measure Description Part This part of the file contains a description of all the control measures necessary for this scenario This part of the file starts with the phrase CONTROL MEASURES This ends the scenario description part of the file The rest of the file is a series of descriptions of the various control measures Most of the descriptions have this general form CM Name coordinate list where CM is a tag specific to each type of the control measure Name is the users unique name for that control measure and coordinate list is a list of the coordinates necessary to describe the control measure Note that some of the control measures have variations on this syntax for optional arguments If the user does not want the name for the control measure to be printed on the display they may append an asterisk at the end of the name For instance consider these two control measures CM George coordinate list CM Bill
150. ronization is explicitly generated by the CNL compiler and need not be specified by the user 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 74 procedure Vector AVOID_STATIC_OBSTACLES with double sphere double safety_margin obs_array readings once header body VECTOR_CLEAR output for int i 0 i lt readings size i pend double c_to_c_dist len_2d readings val i center double radius readings val i r safety_margin double mag 0 if c_to_c_dist lt radius if within safety margin generate big vector mag INFINITY else if c_to_c_dist lt radius sphere generate fraction 0 1 how far are in linear zone mag sphere c_to_c_dist radius sphere otherwise outside obstacle s sphere of influence so ignore it if mag 0 create a unit vector along the direction of repulsion Vector repuls repuls x readings val i center x repuls y readings valli center y unit_2d repuls Set its strength to the magnitude selected mult_2d repuls mag Add it to the running sum plus_2d output repuls Figure 58 CNL code for avoid static obstacles behavior 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 75 include cnl inc modulename Stimpy procedure Vector trashbot_FSA_proc with Vector agent_Look_for_basket Ve Ve Ve Ve bo bo bo bo head ctor agent_Put_can ctor agent_Look_for_can ctor agent_Start ctor agent_Pick_up_can olean detect
151. rrent coordinates of the robot itself along with the current date and time The Battery display shows the current voltage 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 26 sel Im elp T star PTa y Oo e Ri 35 Ri 355 Ri 355 Rar 351 Ri 357 iver Ri SST i i a E a jF Epfry Rn 358 Rn 360 Objective wa Target 23 11 20 80 DTG Yon Mar 31 22 57 38 2008 pottery MN 2 004 Conn Delay 0 13ns E m 360K Copy Room Rm 362 Loss N o PON E Deadman Switch select Delay 2 Innediate Effect close Telop Skip Haypoint y Delayed Effect comett B pana paree Figure 27 Telop Interface of the battery on the robot if such a reading is available The Comm display shows the communication between the robot and the host computer both in terms of ping loss and ping delay in milliseconds The E Stop button is the emergency stop button which will halt the robot if it is pressed Next to it is the Deadman Switch which does nothing if clicked with the mouse but will be explained later in the context of using a real joystick The Skip Waypoint button will cause the AtOrSkipGoal trigger to become true and cause a transition in the FSA if such a trigger was used Finally the Close Telop button will remove the telop interface and end tel
152. s A description of the format for each type of command follows e Start command This command tells the system to initialize this unit It has a simple format UNIT Unit name START Start name dx dy Where Start name indicates the name of the place where the robots are to be initially located The optional dx and dy are offset values for the locations of successive robots in the unit east and north respectively they can be used to keep robots from being placed on top of each other e Moveto command This command tells the unit to move to some specified position It has the following format UNIT Unit name MOVETO Destination name FORMATION FM MT PLS SPEED number where Destination name refers to a previously defined destination control measure If the destination is a line or a region its centroid is computed and used The terms in square brackets are optional and can be given in any order The term FN is a formation name which is one of COLUMN LINE DIAMOND or WEDGE The default formation is no formation The term MT is a movement technique name TRAVELING TRAVELING OVERWATCH or BOUNDING OVERWATCH The default movement technique is TRAVELING In the current release traveling overwatch and bounding overwatch are not implemented The optional speed is in meters per second The final part PLS is an optional phase line specification It has several possible forms PHASE LINE mm dd yy hh mm ss In this form the desired arri
153. s specified the execution proceeds without waiting or putting up a proceed dialog box The user can also specify a set completion time by using the form UNTIL completion time Where completion time is a time and date in the same format as specified in the phase line for the Moveto command If the date is omitted the time is assumed to be day the commands are loaded When that time is reached the execution proceeds e Stop command This command tells the system to stop this unit It has this form UNIT Unit name STOP This involves killing all the processes related to this unit Therefore no commands later in the script should refer to this unit or any units which share robots with this unit since all these robots are now deactivated unless the script restarts the unit with a later START command This often means that the STOP command is the last command in a script This also means that the user should use care in 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 84 executing commands manually since using STOP manually while a script is running could produce a situation where the system attempts to execute a command for a robot is dead e Quit command The command QUIT can be added to the list of commands When it is executed the program stops and exits This is useful in automated execution of command scripts e Most of the SET and PRINT commands described earlier can be embedded in the command lists Notice that all the names of control mea
154. s_distribution tar gz sphigs Sphigs and srgp are used for the 3D display option They are included in the MissionLab source tree Sphigs can be found at ftp ftp cs brown edu 4 Unpack the MissionLab distribution Uncompress and untar the distribution with the following command Do not mix with the old version of MissionLab tar xvzf mlab 6 0 tar gz You now should see a directory named mission This directory will be referred to as the MissionLab home directory 5 Edit a configuration file Edit your MissionLab home src make include to point to the correct places for your system THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP since the most common error during the compilation comes from the fact that this file is setup incorrectly Incorrect setup of this 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 5 file usually produces errors during the compilation of the IPT and may corrupt it permanently The makefiles in the src directories reference these files so changing this file should fix all the makefiles The following are key places in the make include to look for e Set the MLAB_HOME variable to point to your home directory for MissionLab This should include the full directory path e Set XDIR to point to the X directory on your system This is usually usr X11R6 e If the program will run on ONLY one type of machine and one windowing environment set the MLAB_STATIC flag to be empty This will force MissionLab to use shared libraries Static linki
155. ssion on a real robot Color The color specified in this field will be the color of the robot showing up in the mlab console You can choose any rgb color name which is supported by your machine Choose a color which has no space within its name However due to a bug if the display of the mlab console is exported on PC or SGI monitors the robot color may be different from what you specified If you export the display to Sun monitors the color of the robot should appear appropriately Ask for Overlay If this check box is set mlab will bring up a file dialog box asking for an overlay If unchecked mlab will use the overlay listed under Default Overlay Do not run mlab If this check box is set CfgEdit will not invoke mlab and the mission will not be run Instead all the running conditions that the user specified in this dialog will be saved in the CMDL file Section 3 7 Usually the saved CMDL file will be named after the name of the CfgEdit configuration the user specified with Save As option except cdl If the user hasn t saved the configuration the CMDL file will be named after the default configuration name specified by cfgeditrc option DefaultConfiguration The user may then run the mission with mlab directly from a command line 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 62 mlab r lt CMDL file name gt e Pause Before Execution If this check box is set mlab will bring up a dialog box pausing the execution of the mission
156. sures in the command descriptions can be preceded by their tag the CM values from Section 3 8 and a dash This is allowed and encouraged to improve readability of the commands For instance assembly area Alpha can also be referred to as AA Alpha in the command list 3 7 3 Example Command Description File An example of a command description file is given below Notice that the file references an overlay file Also notice the readable nature of the command language THIS IS PART 1 the mission background information MISSION NAME SCENARIO OVERLAY test odl SP Home 0 0 Demo C simulation Demo C NEW ROBOT Robot2 robot base_velocity 5 UNIT lt Wolf gt lt Wolf 1 gt ROBOT ROBOT lt Wolf 2 gt ROBOT2 ROBOT2 ROBOT2 COMMAND LIST O f la 10 11 12 UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo PHASE L UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo UNIT r Wo THIS STARTS PART 2 the command list f START SP Home 10 0 f MOVETO AA Alpha FORMATION diamond traveling overwatch f OCCUPY AA Alpha FORMATION Column f MOVETO ATK Bravo FORMATION Column f OCCUPY ATK Bravo FORMATION Diamond UNTIL TIMEOUT 20 f MOVETO PP Charlie FORMATION Column f FOLLOW Gap Delta FORMATION Column f FOLLOW Axis Foxtrot FORMATI
157. t s position The apparent jump has no effect on the mission other than leaving a robot trail as seen on Figure 48 3 4 7 Using Q Learning for a Behavioral Selection As you have seen so far you can create a robot mission by assembling a sequence of FSA states tasks and triggers as you wish the robot to behave Alternatively MissionLab is also capable of assembling the tasks and triggers automatically during the run time using reinforcement learning methods Q learning In order to create a robot mission that utilizes Q learning run CfgEdit and descend the configuration level down to the third level of the configuration tree By default an FSA operator has been connected to the Wheel Actuator icon After unlinking them by click on the X button on the Wheel Actuator icon delete the FSA operator using the Cut function Choose the QLEARN coordinator from the list of operators after click on Operator button Figure 50 Connect the output of the QLEARN coordinator to the Wheel Actuator icon Figure 51 cfgedit v5 0 0 c Georgia Institute of Technology Instance of base Kind of Actuator Figure 50 CfgEdit QLEARN coordinator is selected from the operator list Unlike the FSA operator where you explicitly specified the sequence of the tasks and triggers in the fourth level of the configuration tree all triggers and tasks that you wish the reinforcer to assemble should 3 THE MISSIO
158. t in those cases e Unit description The units to be used in the mission are described in this entry This entry has several permissible formats A simple one is UNIT lt Name gt Ri Ro Ry where R is a robot identifier such as ROBOT for a generic robot This unit can be referred to using the specified name Name Note the use of angle brackets lt and gt around the unit name The angle brackets are a necessary part of the syntax Other robot identifiers may be defined with the NEW ROBOT command described above Units are often more complicated Therefore the entry can have a more complex recursive structure To specify a unit with two named subunits use the following syntax UNIT lt Name gt lt Name 1 gt Ri Ro Rn lt Name 2 gt Ri Ra Rn where R can be a robot name as above or the embedded definition of another unit This can be repeated recursively as necessary The main point to understand is that each unit or subunit must have a name if commands are to be given to it e Setting system parameters Various system parameters can be set which affect the operation of the system Each of the possible commands will be listed here with a brief explanation A number of these commands take an optional boolean argument ON OFF If neither ON nor OFF is specified ON is assumed Boolean arguments can also use TRUE FALSE or YES NO as equivalents to ON OFF SET SEED seed Set the seed for the random number generator
159. te that the box that has just been pasted will overlap with the original one so you may want to move it to somewhere in the screen by dragging it Figure 36 You can also replace the procedures above with selecting Duplicate from the Edit menu If you wish to go back to see one level higher than the level where you are you can left click the Up 1 Level button in the left menu bar Group of Robots Top Level Individual Robot 2nd Level Actuator Actuator Binding Binding A Sd Level Wheels Camera FSA Diagram FSA Diagram 4th Level States amp Triggers Definitions gt th Level Primitive Behaviors sso eee ee Oth Level Figure 35 CfgEdit a typical configuration tree The third level of the configuration tree describes what state machine is binding to each actuator This level can be reached by middle clicking the Kind of Robot box from the second level The default configuration default cdl is bound with two actuators wheels and camera Figure 5 If you middle click either of the Instance of FSA boxes you can reach the Finite State Acceptor FSA diagram the fourth level Each of the actuators has its own FSA diagram and you can construct a mission using a set of pre defined tasks states and triggers Figure 6 The construction of a mission using this FSA diagram is explained in Section 3 4 4 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 40 Instance of PIONEERAT Kind of Robot Ins ERAT
160. the lower left corner of the mlab screen e Laser Show connected The laser readings will be displayed as a line instead of individual points e Show sonar as arc The sonar readings will be display as an arc instead of a point e Show sonar as point The sonar readings will be display as a point Georgia Institute of Technology Command Options Compass 1 Show robot Trails oT 1000 0m Highlight repelling obstacles H Show movement vectors Y Shos egvesent field Show obstacles F Erase obstacles Learning Momentum Data Logging Debug Laser and sonar display Show Line Of Sight IRA A F Laser Display Normal Laser Display Linear Laser Show connected F Show sonar as arc Show sonar as point Figure 31 The options for the obstacle display 3 2 18 Data Logging Upon the real time execution of the robot for both simulated and physical robots you can record the posi tion velocity heading and the current state of the robot with respect to time if the data logging function is invoked This function can be turned on by both from this Data Logging menu and from the mlab command option L An output file lt robot executable name gt log will be then generated by mlab An example of the output file is shown below 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 31 MissionLab Robot Executable Status Data 0 000 39 400 17 300 0 000 0 000 0 000 1 0 0 345 39 400 17 300 0 000 0 000 0 000
161. the mission plan for the next time 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS of Technology File Configure Command Options Compass AJEJE Help Scale 0 100 0 n Mission area is 1000 0n by 1000 0m Select Overlay File Refresh Pause Zoom 100 Weal mi La 104 Filter 1os usability_demos 2000 ovl Directories Files HM Empty ov en airport ovl configures biofield ovl robots gt_campus ovl hospital ovl marc ovl marc2 ovl 1 rj Fa az Of 12 Selection 1ity_denos 2000 minefield ovl z e E r z Figure 68 mlab asking for an overlay Global Settings xi Figure 69 Toolbox for selecting desired a task MissionLab v6 0 EE File Configure Command Options Conpass Help Refresh Pause zoon 100 y A Scale Okulu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n ps 1 Settings Q Task 0 WaypointsTask 0 Mission Preference Global Settings 3 O Number OfRobots am Task 1 HaypointsTask O 107 f 0 50 Maxvelocity Enj 10 01 1 001 0 30 Aggressiveness 3 Finish 10 01 1 00 EOD Area Figure 70 mlab showing two waypoints being placed 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Scale Okulu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n
162. ton to close the window Slide NumberOfRobots in the Mission Preference window to use 3 robots Figure 72 Click on the red Finish button in the toolbox It will close the mlab session 6 Viewing and Compiling the Generated Mission After the mlab session is closed CfgEdit should bring up the window showing the summary of loadable mission plans based on the preferences and constraints you specified Figure 73 You may browse them using lt lt Previous and Next gt gt buttons In this example load the first mission plan being suggested As you did in the previous demo descend the level of the configuration until you see the FSA diagram using the middle mouse button Figure 74 Compile the mission by pressing the Compile button in the left Please note that if you happen to modify the suggested mission Mission Expert may ask you to save the modified mission plan for the future use In this case toggle appropriate preferences and constraints buttons and click on Savel 7 Running the Generated Mission Click on the Run button in the left and execute the mission If your robots collect and dispose all the mines orange objects in the field Figure 75 you have successfully created a mission using Mission Expert After closing the mlab session Mission Expert should ask you whether the mission was successful This feedback will adjust the rating of
163. tructing another path by repeating the clicks or quitting the planner by middle clicking or right clicking on the map window The path generated by the planner consists of a series of line segments After quitting the planner saves the points forming the line segments in a file named points txt in the directory from which CfgEdit was invoked This file serves as the interface between the planner and CfgyEdit CfgEdit reads that file and constructs an FSA similar to the one shown on Figure 47 This FSA can be compiled and executed as shown 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS GoTo AtGoal GoTo MtGoal GoTo Boal_Location 216 69 268 28 Goal Location lt 216 69 268 289 Goal_Location lt 276 31 274 M gt Goal Location lt 276 31 274 015 To ation oTo toa Goto Goal Location lt 456 69 260 64 gt Coal Location lt 456 69 308 415 Goal_Location lt 456 69 308 41 gt f Goal Location lt 363 44 291 59 Goal Location lt 363 44 291 59 gt ntact Goal_Location lt 456 60 260 64 gt GoTo Goal Location 459 36 220 13 gt Figure 44 CfgEdit constructed FSA with the waypoints function File Configure Command Options Compass Scale Olh 10 0 Mission area is 600 0 by 400 08 Figure 45 mlab robot executing the waypoints mission 52 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 53 Figure 46 Path Planner Window in Figure 48 N
164. ts the spatial locations they wish to reach and about their progress towards the goal in order to help each other to accomplish their missions eventually getting out from local minima 17 To implement this mechanism each robot must be assigned a color which univocally identifies it see the SetRobotColorld state described in the following The parameters you can modify are the ones described for the GoTo state moreover you can specify the robots which should be considered as teammates by enabling the corresponding colors LOS_GoTo_AvoidPast The robot cooperates with other robot whenever they come in sight of each other as in the LOS_GoTo state however when it is not receiving help from teammates the robot behaves as if it were in the GoTo_AvoidPast state The parameters you can modify are the ones described for the GoTo_AvoidPast state moreover you can specify the robots which should be considered as teammates by enabling the corresponding colors LOS_GoTo_MiNav The robot cooperates with other robot whenever they come in sight of each other as in the LOS_GoTo state however when it is not receiving help from teammates the robot behaves as if it were in the GoTo_MiNav state The parameters you can modify are the ones described for the GoTo_MiNav state moreover you can specify the robots which should be considered as teammates by enabling the corresponding colors LeaveRoom The robot leaves the room behind the nearest door usi
165. ts a intersection of hallways DetectFriendlyRobots The transition occurs when the robot detect a robot which is considered as a teammate You must specify in the parameters the color of the robots which should be considered as teammates Detect Motivated The transition occurs when the robot sees an object and all motivational variables have values that fall in the intervals specified by the corresponding upper and lower thresholds for each variable DetectSound The transition occurs when the robot hears a sound having higher volume than the volume_threshold DetectSound Motivated The transition occurs when the robot hears a sound and is suitably moti vated This trigger combines sound capabilities and motivational variables Section 3 2 10 When the current curiosity level of the robot is above a given threshold it behaves like DetectSound mentioned above Moreover every time this trigger gets activated the curiosity value of the robot is decreased by 0 10 This effectively makes the robot indifferent to sounds after a while habituation FlagsClear The transition occurs when the flag is not set FlagsSet The transition occurs when the flag is set Holding The transition occurs when the robot is holding the specified object Immediate The transition occurs immediately without any condition InAlternateHallway The transition occurs when the robot enters the alternate hallway InHallway Transition occurs when the robot is within a
166. under contract number DAAE07 98 C LO38 and DARPA U S Army SMDC under contract number DASG60 99 C 0081 CONTENTS Contents 1 What isMissionLab 1 1 MissionLab Overview meno o Ee a a a a a a A a a i a aa aa ae a aa a a a ea aa a Da a a 1 2 MissionLab Development History ee Getting Started with MissionLab 21 Installing Missi nbab 4 Ta a ee a A a ee AE a 2 2 Running Quick Example Programs 2 2 2 0 000000 02 eee ee eee ee 3 The 3 1 3 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 Deol mlah ee ete Bh Seen Ge a eee SSeS EEE AS Demo 2 GfgHdit 4 6 4 beth SS ORE ROR BRIE Ae BES eek MissionLab Tools Running Misston bab ics os BER ee ee iw HH EG e YO ey mlab User Interface Console ooo ee 3 2 1 3 2 2 3 2 3 3 2 4 3 2 5 3 2 6 3 2 7 3 2 8 3 2 9 3 2 10 3 2 11 3 2 12 3 2 13 3 2 14 3 2 15 3 2 16 3 2 17 3 2 18 3 2 19 3 2 20 mlab Command Line Arguments co ws ss dd a auna e e e Epa PEPEN ER RAS X Motif Resources for mlab o Fil Utilities si age eee eee ee EPR eee ee ae ed Obstacle Creation Dialog Box 2 2 20 0 0000000000000 000004 World Scale Dialog Box iii b e 2 aE E A ee ee Oe We dd BD ae ee Time Scale Dialog Box 0 a a2 42 dt eae Oe a a ed Dynamically Changing the Environment 0 2 0 0 00004 Command Intertace Paneles y a cia AEREA a pe Bethe ee a Sound Simulations aa A EE RE BOR Bh os Gk he See eM Motivational Vector Window 2 2 0 0 000000 eee e
167. until the dialog box button is pressed e Default Overlay The overlay file that mlab will use unless Ask for Overlay box is checked Default is set by cfgeditrc option DefaultOverlay Remember to have the default overlay in the directory where you are running CfgEdit from e Run Pressing this button will cause cfgedit to write out a cmdl file in the current directory with the selected configuration CfgEdit will then execute mlab unless Do not run mlab option is checked with the correct command line arguments causing mlab to run the CMDL file which was automatically generated by CfgEdit e Cancel Pressing this button closes the dialog box without running the mission or saving the running options to a CMDL file 3 4 10 Adding New States and Triggers This section is for an advanced user and describes how to add new states and or triggers to the list that you use to create a mission If you go through the following example steps you can implement the swirl behavior into a new state 1 Choose Primitive Behaviors to Bind You have to have primitive behaviors to which your new state trigger will incorporate The primitive behaviors are written in the Configuration Net work Language CNL and stored in the your MissionLab homel src libcnl directory You can use those existing ones or if you wish you can create your own primitive behaviors If you are going to create your own primitive behaviors make sure that
168. val date and time are specified The order of the date and the time can be reversed The seconds and the preceding colon can be omitted from any time specifications If the date is omitted the time is assumed to be for the current day PHASE LINE hh mm ss If a is put in front of a time it is assumed to be relative to the current time PHASE LINE hh mm ss If a number is given with no colon it assumed to be in minutes PHASE LINE number Although the phase line specification can be given in command lists currently it is ignored in command execution Except Start command which can be used for the CfgEdit type robot these commands only apply for the manually coded type robot described in Section 3 3 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 83 e Teleoperate command This command puts the unit under the control of the teleoperation interface It has the following format UNIT Unit name TELEOPERATE Destination name FORMATION FN SPEED number The destination name is currently ignored The other components are the same as in the MOVETO command When the user has moved the unit as desired pressing the End Teleoperation button on the teleoperation interfaces causes this command to be completed One current limitation is that only one unit can be controlled with this command per step e Follow command This command tells the unit to follow some line feature It has the following format UNIT Unit name FOLLOW Destination name F
169. ve spaces If a value name value pair is left out a default value is used Usually this is the empty string for strings and 0 for numbers but there are exceptions covered later Value names represent settable options pertaining to the type of hardware the section represents For example laser sections have a port_string value This value defines the serial port such as dev ttyS0 hserver will use to try to connect with the laser Value names are not case sensitive Below is an example of a section for a device of type laser with the name laserS1 The specialized value names for this and other devices will be described in detail later on lt start laser laserS1 gt name front port_string dev ttyS1 angle_offset 0 x_offset 0 in cm y_of set 0 in cm listen_ipt false send_ipt false stream_host localhost used for streaming lt end gt Values are strings that may contain spaces Values start with the first non white space character after the character which follows the value name and continues to the end of the line or the character Trailing white space is deleted For example the lines port_string dev ttyS0 port_string dev ttyS0 port_string dev ttySO this is the port string port_string dev ttyS0 this is the port string will all reduce to having a value of dev ttyS0 Values may or may not be case sensitive depending on the context For example the boolean value true
170. via ARPANET File Transfer Program FTP After pressing the Run button CfgEdit will login to the remote machine as the user who are specified as RemoteShellUserName in the cfgeditrc file and start downloading the file into RemoteHostRobotDir directory In order for FTP to check the password automatically you also have to create a file called netrc in your home directory and specify the password for the user RemoteShellUserName If your remote machine is for example cartman cc gatech edu and your RemoteShellUserName is demo your netrc file should have the following lines machine cartman cc gatech edu 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 61 Figure 54 CfgEdit Run Dialog login demo password lt password for user demo gt Since mlab uses rsh remote shell to execute the robot executable you need to create the rhosts file in the home directory of the RemoteShellUserName on the remote machine as well For example if your username is wendy and your local machine is stan cc gatech edu write this line in the rhosts file stan cc gatech edu wendy Remote host computer If this field is empty the robot executable is executed on the current machine If this field is filled the robot executable is executed on the remote host via an rsh Default is set by cfgeditrc option DefaultHost Robot name This name is used as an ID for HServer if the user chooses to run the mi
171. vior readings is an array that contains locations of obstacles and goal rel loc is a vector directed to the goal location Thus let us declare these inputs in the agents gen and agents AuRA urban respectively as the following Copy this in default gen defAgent displacement SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES const number sphere const number safety_margin const number open_space const number open_sphere location goal_rel_loc obs_array readings Copy this in default AuRA urban defAgent AuRA urban binds SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES Vector SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES const double sphere 3 0 const double safety_margin 0 5 const double open_space 0 5 const double open_sphere 0 5 Vector goal_rel_loc obs_array readings 3 Construct Behavioral Assemblages In CfgEdit primitive behaviors are coordinated and as sembled as states using the cooperative coordination operators COOP cnl and they are defined in the files agents gen and agents AuRA urban In our case let us define the assemblages for the GoTo_with_Swirl state as the following and paste it into the files Probably the best places to paste it into the files are just after the GoTo state is defined SRecently it was also integrated into this system GoToOutdoorNavigation Therefore you can skip this part 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 64 Copy this in both agents gen and agents AuRA urban 7 RSS lollbjo lok GoT
172. w grid centered on the robot is stored in memory which only partially overlaps with the previous one Consequently all the information stored in the non overlapping area gets lost The scale of the grid is fixed and set to 10 cells meters GoTo_CBR This behavior is based on the normal GoTo behavior Instead of the user handcoding the behavioral parameters it uses a Case Based Reasoning system for Behavioral Selection 11 12 Note this CBR is totally independent from the CBR used in CBRServer The system keeps a set of such parameters in a library and chooses the one best fitting the current environment The library can be modifiable or handcoded In the first case the system can learn starting from an empty library or improve an existing library Please note that the case library file needs to be in the same directory as the robot executable An empty library is provided at your MissionLab home demos mars_demos cbr_behavioral_select cases GoTo_Dstar This behavior implements the D Lite planner within the GoTo behavior For more details on D Lite please refer to the paper by Koenig and Likhachev 8 The behavior is a front end for an architecture that tries to switch between planning by D Lite and reactive control at appropriate situations The two parameters that control the switching capability are the Dstar_angle_dev and Dstar_persistence The Dstar_angle_dev parameter is a measure of the tolerance of t
173. xpert e Open up another 3rd terminal window e Go to the same mars_demos directory Run CfgEdit and choose New Robot in the first dialog box cfgedit e The second dialog should ask you whether to use Mission Expert Figure 67 Select Yes to the question 5 Designing a Mission e At this point mlab should be asking you to select an overlay Figure 68 Choose minefield ovl mlab should now popup the windows for designing a mission Click on Waypoints Task in the toolbox to highlight the button Figure 69 e Click on anywhere in the field with the left mouse button It should create an icon for Waypoints Task Repeat once more to create two waypoints Figure 70 e Now click on the EOD Task button in the toolbox window 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 103 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology Figure 67 CfgEdit with the dialog box asking for Mission Expert usage Click on anywhere in the field with the left mouse button again It should create an icon for EOD Task this time View the setup for the EOD task by clicking the EOD Task icon with the right mouse button and change the Environment to be Outdoor Figure 71 Click on the Apply button to close the window View the setup for the EOD task by clicking the EOD Task icon with right mouse button and change the Environment to be Outdoor Figure 71 Click on the Apply but
174. y Additional Executable Changes Mission P Robot s FSA Based Mission User Composer CfgEdit Requirements ENN Mission Plan Preference Mission Plan Database amp Mission Planning Engine CBRServer Figure 64 Mission Expert processes mlab CfgEdit and CBRServer 3 10 2 Invoking CBRServer CBRServer takes the following command line arguments cbrserver dh s socket name 1 library name 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Figure 65 Interactions among the user mlab CfgEdit and internal modules of CBRServer modification of a constraints suggested plan preferences constraints preferences constraints preferences mission plan Domain Manager ballpark solutions constraints preferences 101 d enables the debugging mode and it will dump debugging information in a file whose name would be something like cbrserver debug xxxx yyyy out where xxxx is your user name and yyyy is a current date h will print out the usage s will set CBRServer to use socket name to communicate with CfgEdit The default socket name is tmp xxxx cbrplanner socket where xxxx is your user name The default socket name can be altered by uncommenting the line for CBRServerSocketName in cfgeditrc 1 option will make CBRServer to load the specified CBR library file cbl upon start up The invoked CBRServer will display the ncursor window as in Figure 66
175. y controls all the robot hardware either via TCP IP or a serial link and provides a standard interface for all the robots and sensors The CfgEdit generated code uses this standard interface to control the real robots HServer also provides direct control configuration and status of the robots and sensors Details on HServer are described in Section 3 9 CBRServer CBRServer CaseBased Reasoning Server generates a mission plan based on specs pro vided by the user by retrieving and assembling components of previously stored successful mission plans Details on CBRServer are described in Section 3 10 In addition to CDL and CNL described above there are two more original languages that were specifically developed for the MissionLab system CMDL The Command Description Language CMDL may optionally be used for describing simple sequential robot missions A CMDL file containing both background and command information will 1 WHAT ISMISSIONLAB 2 be read by mlab at runtime and offer a mechanism for providing high level input to robot behaviors developed in CNL When robot executables are directly created by CfgEdit users may not need to use CMDL CMDL is described in Section 3 7 e ODL The Overlay Description Language ODL provides descriptions of the environment which mlab can graphically translate to a map or a floor plan of an experimental area For example a robot s starting point obstacles boundaries are among those features th

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