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User Manual - College of Computing

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1. STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by SurveyRoom As explained in the TaskExited section above Sur AuRA urban veyRoom is an example of states with nested sub FSA states and triggers Figure 40 Assuming that the robot is in a room it looks for a possible object e g biohazard If the robot finds the possible bio hazard 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 ob ject was not a real biohazard the robot will keep look ing 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 TaskEx ited SurveyRoom is composed with the follow ing nested sub FSA states and triggers Start Im mediate LookFor Detect NotDetected Move Toward Near TestObject TestNegative Test Positive and ExitTask Talk The robot reads and talks specified message AuRA urban Telop It enables the Teleautonomous Operation Telop AuRA nava You can drive the robot with a joystick like window AuRA urban Ter
2. 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 3 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 23 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 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 QLEARN 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
3. should have the following lines 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 66 machine cartman cc gatech edu 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 e 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 e Robot name This name is used as an ID for HServer if the user chooses to run the mission on a real robot e 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 e Ask for Overlay If this check box is set mlab will bring up a file dialog box asking for an overlay If unchecked
4. 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 SubmMissionRead 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 e File Configure Command Options Compass Help Scale Olylu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n Refresh Zoon 100 y Af EOD Area end mexp endo 04032003 0 10748 z E y Figure 75 mlab showing the three robots executing the EOD task 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 111 3 9 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 9 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
5. StartPlace GoTo_with_Swirl E Figure 57 mlab testing the GoTo_with_Swirl state 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 72 3 4 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 transiti
6. AuRA naval AuRA urban Mark The robot marks the nearest object to be the specified object AuRA naval AuRA urban 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 AuRA urban 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 automat ically See MOTIVATIONAL_UPDATE cnl for how the update rules are set up AuRA urban 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 50 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by MoveA head The robot moves to the compass direction specified by AuRA naval the user East 0 and North 90 AuRA urban MoveAway The robot moves away from selected types of objects AuRA naval AuRA urban MoveForward The robot moves in the direction it is currently facing AuRA naval AuRA urban MovelnFormation A group of robots moves to a goal location in a speci AuRA urban fied formation MoveToward The robot moves to the closest object of a certain type AuRA naval AuRA urban MoveToward_LM This behavior is an alteration of the MoveToward AuRA urban 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
7. File Configure Command Options Compass He Scale Olylu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n Pause zoom 100 y A ios Bl 0 E x Mission Preference Global Settings 3 O Number O0fRobots a4 Task 1 HagpointsTask 1 107 0 50 NaxVelocity ot 0 E 10 01 1 00 Global Setti Oe pamelor am TO oe Task 0 MaypointsTask EOD Area lord yi E Ei MissionLab v6 Figure 70 mlab showing two waypoints being placed NS gia Institute e Configure Command Options Compass Scale Olylu 1 0 m Mission area is 40 0n by 30 0n bal Settings O Task 1 Hagpoi Q Task 0 WaypointsTask Return Q Task 2 TEoDTask l ex Help Pause zoom 100 y Af 0 F x 0 Mission Preference Global Settings 3 e x Jer ofRobots at El 10 Task Preference Task 2 EODTask 0 50 Jelocity ot Localization PA F UseLandnarks 3 UseMaps 0 30 lessiveness pan E 10 01 1 007 4 Indoor F Outdoor HandlesEneny F False True ID Apply Cancel y y Ej Figure 71 mlab showing the setup for the EOD task 108 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 109 Mission Preference Global Settings 3 NumberOfRobots 1 10 0 50 MaxVelocity Ls 0 01 1 00 0 30 Aggressiveness EE 0 01 1 00 Figure
8. Note The configure script which calls makedepend may generate numerous warnings but they can be safely ignored 6 Set up your user environment After compilation modify your tcshrc etc to setup your envi ronment e Add your MissionLab home bin into your execution path e Add into your execution path 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 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 the 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 used to be 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 run mlab Fi
9. 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 tol erance of the planner or the freedom given to the re active 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 deter mines the inertia of the planner The planner is acti vated only N cycles after the condition for its activa tion 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 exe cutable 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
10. e Display area The largest part of the user interface 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 1 2 mlab Command Line Arguments mlab can take several optional arguments The full form of the form is mlab X options Other options CMDL file n All of the arguments are optional X options is a normal X options such as geometry etc The main argument CMDL file is the name of a command description CMDL file to load as part of the startup process Other options are 3 c filename Enable the 3D mode Enable the assistant dialog Enable the playback mode Pick your own robot log data Repair mission with the playback mode Run with M Use a specified configuration file instead of cfgeditrc 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 18 C d D filename e filename h H height I hostname l L m filename M string N cnpmode p filename s number 5 t number T w filename W width X nN Show the command panel on start up Enable debugging Display the CMDLi panel Use the specified CMDLi file Enable event logging Use the specified file Show usage Set the height of the main window Use the specified address as the IPT host Show color map Log the robot data
11. lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS BEGIN gt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS ROBOT ID 4 lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME VEHICLE_TYPES CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 3 CONSTRAINT OPTION UAV CONSTRAINT OPTION USV CONSTRAINT OPTION UUV 117 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS CONSTRAINT OPTION UGV lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME STEALTHINESS CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 1 CONSTRAINT OPTION STEALTHY CONSTRAINT OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS BEGIN gt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS ROBOT 1D 5 lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME VEHICLE_TYPES CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 3 CONSTRAINT OPTION UAV CONSTRAINT OPTION USV CONSTRAINT OPTION UUV CONSTRAINT OPTION UGV lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME STEALTHINESS CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 1 CONSTRAINT OPTION STEALTHY CONSTRAINT OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS END gt Local Tasks TASK BUTTON NAME BiohazardBtn MineBtn WaypointsBtn HostageMonitoringTask SearchAndRescueTask InspectBtn InterceptBtn MineOceanBtn ObserveBtn TrackB
12. uax_sensor_range pushed up En nove the robot towards the joysti Read only agents AuRA urban Kind of Asseublage pushed up max_sensor_range pushed up Zclasses E Figure 38 CfgEdit the definition of the GoTo state Determine where the global goa wove to goal O Read only agents AuRA urban Instance of HOVE_TO Kind of Asseublage Read only agents AuRA urban nated ssl Loa a nad wl lean true have_a_goal EJ goal_rel_loc Figure 39 CfgEdit the definition of the Move the robot to the goal 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Iumediate 3 ed Possible_Biohazard Detect Near Possible_Biohazard Possible Biohazard XX TestObject Biohazard TestPositive up 4 Level fans S A ara ERA marzo ama laa Figure 40 CfgEdit a set of sub FSA states and triggers in the SurveyRoom state Figure 41 CfgEdit the CNL code for MOVE_TO behavior is popped up 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 44 3 3 4 Building a Mission Construction of a mission using the FSA 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 Fi
13. 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 33 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 32 Current Robot State robot 1 FSA 1 current robot 1 FSA 5 current robot 1 FSA 4 current robot 1 FSA 4 current State5 SurveyRoomx Start Stop Statel LookFor State2 MoveToward Figure 33 Report Current State Window 3 1 22 Show Line Of Sight 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 18 A Visibility ch
14. Stay on path and A void static obstacles schemas 1 PutInEOD The robot puts the object it is carrying into the EOD AuRA naval area AuRA urban Reset World Given the specified overlay this task will terminates AuRA naval the current mission and restart it from the beginning AuRA urban It is useful for experiments that need to be repeated a number of times 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 51 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by Run_EODTask The robot executes EOD Task AuRA naval Run_Inspect Task The robot executes Inspect Task AuRA naval Run_InterceptTask The robot executes Intercept Task AuRA naval Run_ObserveTask The robot executes Observe Task AuRA naval Run_TrackTask The robot executes Track Task AuRA naval SLUAV_Transport The robot transports a SLUAV AuRA naval SetCameraTrackerMode The robot changes its camera tracking mode AuRA urban Set MobilityType The robot changes the mobility type of the robot Avaliable robot types are UGV UUV USV UAV SLUAVU and SLUAVL Also if UXV is selected both UGV and USV will be supported depending on the terrain AuRA urban SetRobotColorId This is an initialization state which sets the unique identifier the color of the robot for Line Of Sight be haviors states with the LOS prefix The color identi fier which is assigned to each robot must correspond
15. Stimpy procedure Vector trashbot_FSA_proc with Ve Ve Ve Ve Ve ctor agent_Look_for_basket ctor agent_Put_can ctor agent_Look_for_can ctor agent_Start ctor agent_Pick_up_can boolean detect_basket boolean drop_can boolean detect_can bo head 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 80 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_BAS
16. Vector goal_rel_loc However since this is the first time that SWIRL_STATIC OBSTACLES cnl 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 4We used to use default AuRA and agents AuRA as our primary libraries in the past We are now mainly using default AuRA naval and agents AuRA naval which are refined version of the previous one and targeted for naval usage For urban usage use AuRA urban by modifying the configuration file cfgedit and set restrict_names to be AuRA urban and DefaultConfiguration to be urban cdl 5Recently it was also integrated into this system GoToOutdoorNavigation Therefore you can skip this part 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS double open_sphere obs_array readings Vector goal_rel_loc header body 68 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 b
17. cfgeditrc unless your version of MissionLab was installed with the Case Based Reasoning Mission Planning Wizard capability Tf 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 36 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 Note 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 37 You can also replace the procedures above with selecting Duplicate from the Edit menu If you wish to go back to see one level hi
18. key navigation_move_to_goal_gain base 0 8 inc 1 key navigation_avoid_obstacle_gain base 1 5 inc O 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 parameters 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 29 of 0 in thi
19. 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 have 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_st
20. Pick a coordinate of a single point on the map and write in the outfile Enable the Mission Design mode The specified string is to name output files Set the CNP mode The input can be either a number or string e 0 or CNP_MODE DISABLED e 1 or CNP_MODE_PREMISSION e 2 or CNP MODE RUNTIME e 3 or CNP MODE_PREMISSION_AND_RUNTIME Use the specified personality file Pause before execution Start the mission as soon as mlab is loaded Pick the overlay of the mission manually Set the random number seed Display the current state information during the execution Time to expire mlab in second Show the telop interface on start up Enable the waypoint mode and output the coordinates in the file Set the width of the main window Show the fallback resources Do not show the copyright dialog 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 19 3 1 3 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
21. Run a script called demo_3d compile it and run the mission after enabling the Enable 3D option in the run dialog Figure 35 mlab the 3D Display 3 1 25 Help Menu The help menu located on the right end of the menu bar has two entries About and Copyright that each invoke 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 2 Robot Executables When you run MissionLab whether for simulation or real robots mlab Section 3 1 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 l benl 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 8 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
22. click on the EOD Task button in the toolbox window 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 107 cfgedit v5 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology Figure 67 CfgEdit with the dialog box asking for Mission Expert usage e Click on anywhere in the field with the left mouse button again It should create an icon for EOD Task this time e 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 e Slide NumberOfRobots in the Mission Preference window to use 3 robots Figure 72 e Click on the red Finish button in the toolbox It will close the mlab session E MissionLab v5 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology ETE File Configure Command options Compass Help Scale 0 100 0 m Mission area is 1000 0m by 1000 0m Refresh Pause Zoom 100 vila 41 Select Overlay File Ix Filter 1os usability_denos 2000 ovl Directories ARM Empty ovl ais airport ovl configures biofield ovl robots gt_campus ovl hospital ovl Selection lity_demos 2000 ninefield ovl oK Cancel Figure 68 mlab asking for an overlay 6 Viewing and Compiling the Generated Mission 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS
23. 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 32 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 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 31 Georgia Institute of Technology Command Options Compass 1 Show robot Trails T 1900 0n Highlight repelling obstacles Show movement vectors Y Shas esveseot field Show obstacles F Erase obstacles Learning Momentun Data Logging Debug Laser and sonar display Show Line Of Sight AAA F Laser Display Normal Laser Display Linear Laser Show connected F Show sonar as arc Shou sonar as point
24. 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 measures in the command descriptions can be preceded by their tag the CM values from Section 3 7 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 6 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 O d la 10 11 12 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 UNIT UNIT UNIT UNIT r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo r Wo COMMAND LIST 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
25. 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 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 Amigobot Default is the empty string e pioneer This represents options for a Pioneer AT Currently defined values are 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 97 port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the Pioneer AT Default is the empty string e pioneerd This represents options for a Pioneer 2DX Currently defined values are port_string This defines what serial port hserver should use to connect to the Pioneer 2DX 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 whethe
26. 28 gt N _Goal_Location lt 276 31 274 01 Goal Location lt 276 31 214 019 Goal_Loration lt 311 08 275 54 gt AtGoal Goal_Location lt 311 08 975 54 gt GoTo Atsoa toto RtGoat bor Goal Location lt 456 89 260 64 gt 9 Goal Location 456 69 208 415 Goal Location lt 456 69 308 41 gt f Goal Location lt 262 44 291 59 gt CT Gonl_Location_ lt 456 69 260 64 Figure 44 CfgEdit constructed FSA with the waypoints function 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Figure 45 mlab robot executing the waypoints mission Figure 46 Path Planner Window 57 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 Scal
27. 3 7 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 MISSIONLAB TOOLS 93 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 xn 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 94 3 8 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 3 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 d
28. 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 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 rip 4 Level Ez e AA Sal marzo aa al Figure 15 CfgEdit compilation 14 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 Run 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 Cfg Edit ie Tuned iate Figure 16 CfgEdit running mlab 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB File Configure Command Options Compass Scale Oly 1 0 m Mission area is 45 08 by 45 08 Refresh Zoom 100 Y a StartPlace PIONEER_Ful _Config Figure 17 mlab running the back_and forth robot 15 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 16 3 The MissionLab Tools 3 1 mlab User Interface Console 3 1 1 Staring mlab When you ran the quick demo program in the previous section you ran a script called demo in the dire
29. Figure 32 The options for the obstacle display 3 1 20 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 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 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 1 21 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
30. 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 information as commands are executed This informa tion will probably be most useful for the software developers SET DEBUG SCHEDULER ON OFF 84 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 85 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
31. 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 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 a
32. LOCAL 1 CBR LOCAL CNP TASK CONSTRAINT 2 CNP TASK CONSTRAINT 3 CNP ROBOT CONSTRAINT 4 CNP RUNTIME CNP Mission Manager only 5 CNP RUNTIME CNP Bidder only 6 CNP RUNTIME CNP Mission Manager Bidder 7 Defined in mission_expert_types h FEATURE NON INDEX FALSE 0 TRUE 1 FEATURE HIDE 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 SLIDER100 3 1 100 lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 0 FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE HIDE 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 90 FEATURE NAME NumberOfRobots FEATURE OPTION TYPE 3 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 1 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 0 FEATURE NON INDEX 1 FEATURE HIDE 1 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 00 FEATURE NAME MaxVelocity FEATURE OPTION TYPE 2 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 5 0 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 0 FEATURE NON INDEX 1 FEATURE HIDE 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 00 FEATURE NAME Aggressiveness FEATURE OPTION TYPE 1 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 0 25 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 2 FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE HIDE 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 80 FEATURE NAME ENVIRONMENT FEATURE OPTION TYPE 0 FEATURE SELECTED O
33. 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 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 6 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
34. Step 5 UNIT blue team MoveTo PP P4a FORMATION Hedge Traveling Close Figure 24 Command Interface 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 Section 3 6 to load The 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 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
35. TYPE_NAME NAME SELECT_STYLE EndDefop EndDefop ParmDef Os OpSetArch defOp ARCH_NAME defOp DefineRobot 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 RobotParms 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_
36. a ee ee ed Motivational Vector Window 20 0 e Felop Interface bc amp ss SSA See ea ge A de Y Personality Window i sd 8 tee a a a aE LA ww ey Robot Trails ini dient oooh 2 dl Ee ee de eed Obstacle Highlighting Laa e PS BG eee ME BS Movement Vectors sane acidic oe a o a a Eee ep PR eee Movement Field i 4 445 Re E a a ee dee ee a Sensor Readings Display ee ee ee Data Logging sn ai to a eke ee BS AALS pete ee ee ee ea A ae ae Debug Options 4 4 4 4 44 6998 44 228 LDS a a Ae ORE PO CONTENTS y 3 2 3 3 3 4 3 5 3 6 3 7 3 8 3 9 3 122 Show Line OESIE 4 pate a ta are k a bob AS E a ea 32 3 123 Compass Window 0d e o wa e a a ee e a a 32 SaD Displays 22 alata te A A EA Ae a e A N 33 3 1 25 Help Menu AAA AA a 33 Robot Executables sia id dt Sa a a ee ar an Ae amp 34 CfgEdit Configuration Editor 35 3 3 1 Reviewing the Configuration File o e e e 35 3 3 2 Running Cfg Edi ir a A a EE ES da 39 3 3 3 Browsing the Configuration Tree ee 40 3 9 4 gt Buildi e a MISSION Iorin eth od e a A o a Sh eG 44 3 3 5 Using Waypoints Tool ee ee 44 3 3 6 Using Path Planning Tool eea acca ne 0 0 00 0 0000000200000 55 3 3 7 Using Q Learning for a Behavioral Selection 2 0 0 0 a 61 3 3 8 Analyzing and Compiling the Robot Executable 0 64 3 3 9 Executing the Robot Executable 0 0 2 0
37. a middle mouse button Figure 4 CfgEdit the top level 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 e Click the box labeled with Kind of Assemblage under the heading Group of Robots with the middle button of the mouse middle click e If you middle click again in the box for Instance of DEFAULT_ROBOT you will see the display like the one in Figure 5 Instance of base Kind of Actuator max_vel base_vel cautious vel cautious_wode Figure 5 CfgEdit the third level e 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 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 9 Figure 6 CfgEdit the FSA diagram e 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 e Move the pointer into the display area and left click again You will see a new state whose default is Stop Figure 7 Figure 7 CfgEdit adding a new state e In order to modify the state into another state right click the Stop state a
38. 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 tokens 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 FNis 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 over
39. 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 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 2 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 por
40. area is 40 0n by 30 0n Refresh Resune Zoom 100 Hl 4 yuveeysy Aare ARE pm Distance to Field Edge neters 0 5 xine Field Resolution meters ARAAAARRI RARA RARA Cea He py Draw Field Stop Drawing Close Home Figure 31 Movement field shown in mlab 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 only be invoked when the simulation is paused All vectors in the field are based 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 1 19 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
41. 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 list 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 22 REGION z1 y1 2 y2 ADD OBSTACLE coverage min_rad maz_rad seedl seed inc 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 10
42. 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 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 99 Figure 63 HServer main window 3 8 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 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 OD SB O N H P OH WU A Aw R Display laptop battery information if it is available Start Sony EVI D30 camera if not connected or show the camera control menu Clear text 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 Conne
43. command list sequentially e mlab has several serious memory bugs when it attempts to load command files which may cause a crash The bug erupts when trying to execute a NEW ROBO T 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 123 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 ip
44. 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 the real power comes from using the Configuration Editor to graphically create and maintain configuration specified in CDL 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 77 3 5 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 n
45. 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 executing 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 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 24 3 1 10 CMDLi Interface Panel CMDLi was developed by Mobile Intelligence Corporation in or
46. 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 CfgEdit are explained in Section 3 3 The other method to create the robot executable is by programming in CNL manually mlab 2 0 robot your MissionLab home src robot mlab 2 0 robot mlab 2 0 robot and tmr_robot 1998 your Mis sionLab 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 form
47. from its beginning towards its end e Objective This entry indicates an objective It has the format OBJ Name z yi YaY2 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 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 92 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
48. 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 list 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 Rn 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
49. 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 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 4 Robot definition parameter keyword descriptions 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 83 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 5 The keywords described in Table 6 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 5 Robot definition parameter device type selection keyword descriptions only relevant
50. 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 range 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
51. of influence and wander persistence are contin uously changed at mission run time using a Learning Momentum LM algorithm See the description for the GoTo_LM state above MoveToward_NotifiedObject The robot moves to the broadcasted object location AuRA naval Notify The robot sends a notification with a message pre AuRA naval specified by the user The message can be sent across AuRA urban 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 synchro nization of two FSAs This message will not be how ever sent to different robots Use NotifyRobots ex plained below for communicating with other robots NotifyGoals The robot notifies its goal position to other robots AuRA urban NotifyRobots This state works similar to how Notify works ex AuRA naval plained above However in this state the robot can AuRA urban 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 NotifyRobots_ObjectLocation The robot broadcasts the location of the closest object AuRA naval PickUp The robot picks up nearest object specified by the user AuRA naval AuRA urban ProceedAlongHallway The robot moves down the hallway This state is AuRA urban assembled by Move to goal
52. since MissionLab 7 0 is the automated task allocation functionality through Contract Net Protocol CNP CNP is an auction based negotiation algorithm that is used here to assign tasks to robots to achieve the overall mission The task allocation may occur during the mission specification premission CNP or during the exeuction runtime CNP MissionLab supports both premission CNP and runtime CNP The following example shows how to specify a mission using the CBR Wizard while allocation of the tasks is done during the execution runtime CNP 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 113 1 Run the demo scrip e Go to the demo directory cd your MissionLab home demos ao fnc_demos e Run the script to start the CBRServer and CfgEdit processes demo_type I nmc e Answer New Robot Yes to Do you want to use Mission Expert Yes to using CNP No to premission CNP and Yes to Runtime CNP when asked 2 Create a Biohazard Mission e Select sea mines ovl as the overlay e Set NMC Naval Mine Countermeasure as the overall mission and hit Apply e Click anywhere on the overlay where you would like deploy the bidder robots e When the dialog pops up click on the blue Next gt gt button until you see that VEHICLE_TYPE is USV Unmanned Surface Vehicle e Hit the red Select button e Click again on the overlay and select another USV so that there will be at least tw
53. the Playback Functiod 111 3 9 6 CBR CNP Integration 0 002 002 0002 0022 2 eee 112 3 9 7 Customizing Preference and Constraint Sets and Toolbox 113 4 Support Software 121 4 1 Communications Software IPT 2 aaa ee 121 4 2 Process Control Software C Threads ee 121 5 Current Limitations of MissionLab 122 6 FAQ Trouble Shooting 123 7 Feedback and Bug Reports 124 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 ATRV Jr Urban Robot iRobot AmigoBot Pioneer AT Pioneer 2DX ActivMedia Inc and Nomad 150 200 Nomadic Technologies Inc are among those robots MissionLab has supported 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 monitor
54. the current status of the robot when mlab is running ShowRobotStatus False To set the default time second for the mission to expire uncomment this line MissionExpirationTime 180 xkkkkxkxkkkxkxx CNL Architecture configuration FRR RR k kk k kk kk k k k ok k Directories to look in for link libraries Seperate each path with a colon Newlines are allowed after the colon lib_paths MLAB_HOME 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 MLAB_HOME 1ib cnl directories to look in for CNL source files to display in the editor CNL_sources MLAB_HOME src libcnl cflags parm passed to C compiler cflags g I MLAB_HOME src include ldflags parm passed to C compiler ldflags L MLAB_HOME 1ib lcthreads CNL_LIBS lhardware_drivers lipt 1stdc lm lqlearn 1cbr_behavioral_select ldstar 1cnp 1CommBehavior kKKKKKKKEKK Real robot configuration flags FR OR k k k k k kkk k k ok ok k The list of real robots we know about robots HServer Any misc robot settings that will be dumped to the script file MiscRobotSettings set show trails on set scale robots on set ROBOT LENGTH 1 Any list of strings attached to the robot name will be appended to
55. until the user clicks in the joystick with the middle mouse button and then the joystick will return to the neutral position Using a Real Joystick In order to teleoperate the robot with a real USB joystick connected via dev js0 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 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 1 14 Personality Window The last entry in the Command menu is Personality which invokes the personality window Figure 29 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 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 mo
56. 0 a 64 3 3 10 Adding New States and Triggers o 67 323 11 Using Mission Expert ga ccs bh fA A A i ok ee dae te 70 CDL Configuration Description Language e eee eee 72 CNL Configuration Network Language 2 2 2 77 CMDL Command Description Language ooo e a 81 3 6 1 Mission background information palt e 81 3 6 2 Mission Command List Part 2 0 0 0 0 0 000000 000200000 85 3 6 3 Example Command Description File 2 002000 004 88 ODL Overlay Description Language 89 3 7 1 Scenario Information Part 2 0 0 a a e a ee ee 89 3 7 2 Control Measure Description Part eee ee 90 3 7 3 Example Overlay Description File o e 92 HServer Hardware Server bee aA Aa eee 94 3 81 Configuration Files i paee ara rr eR we a SS da 94 3 8 2 Command Line Arguments 2 0 a e e E e Eea ee ee 97 3 8 3 Environment Variables sc 2 4 oe db a a a ee ad GR Gee ee 98 3 8 4 User Interface and Key Commands 2 000000 0 00000 99 CBRServer and CBR Mission Planning Wizard Mission Expert 0 104 39 1 Overview encia ci bie 2 AAA i eo AOE E da e 104 CONTENTS vi 3 9 2 Invoking CBR Serve a e rra a dd da eee be 104 3 9 3 Creating an Example Mission Using Mission Expert o 106 3 9 4 Expert Menu in Cfgidits si E A ES ew ld oia a 111 3 9 5 Repairing a Faulty Mission Using
57. 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 e g tcshrc Read the section in the manual where it describes how to install MissionLab 7 FEEDBACK AND BUG REPORTS 124 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 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 Proceedi
58. 0 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 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 e
59. 2002 pp 1282 1289 REFERENCES 125 13 14 15 16 17 18 Lyons D M and Arbib M A A Formal Model of Computation for Sensory Based Robotics IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 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 Moshkina L Endo Y and Arkin R C Usability Evaluation of an Automated Mission Specification Proc First Human Robot Interaction Conference Salt Lake City 2006 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
60. 72 Mission Preference window to adjust the global setting e 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 e 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 e 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 Figure 73 Summary of loadable mission plans with their suitability ratings 7 Running the Generated Mission e Click on the Run button in the left and execute the mission e 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 e After closing the mlab session Mission Expert should ask you whether the mission was successful This feedback will adjust the rating of the mission plan for the next time 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 110
61. AME INLINE_NAME ACTUATOR_CLASS Loc INLINE_NAME INLINE_NAME SENSOR_CLASS Loc MaybeName SorAclass Loc aS instActuator Loc NAME from ACTUATOR_CLASS instSensor Loc NAME from SENSOR_CLASS StartSorAInst ParmSet MaybeName BP_CLASS ParmSet Loc instBP Loc NAME from BP_CLASS ParmSet AgentList Loc instGroup Loc NAME from AgentList Agent Link LinkorAgent AgentList LG 75 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 76 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 naval 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
62. AuRA urban pressed in console StrongCommSignal The transition occurs when the robot has the commu AuRA urban nication signal above the threshold SubMissionReady See StartSubMission task in Table 1 AuRA naval AuRA urban TaskExited As it was explained in the Exit Task section above the AuRA naval transition occurs when the robot is in the ExitTask AuRA urban state of the sub FSA whose message string matches with the one specified for this trigger TelopComplete The transition occurs when the Telop window is closed AuRA naval AuRA urban Test Negative The transition occurs when the result of the TestO AuRA urban bject state explained above is negative Test Positive The transition occurs when the result of the TestO AuRA urban bject state explained above is positive ThroughDoorway The transition occurs when the robot passes through AuRA urban a doorway UnmarkedDoorway The transition occurs when the nearest doorway has AuRA urban been unmarked Wait The transition occurs when the timer expires AuRA naval AuRA urban 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 3 3 6 Using Path Planning Tool In addition to the waypoint specification functionality described in Section 3 3 5 CfgEdit allows users to tak
63. CBRServer and CBR Mission Planning Wizard Mission Expert 3 9 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 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
64. DL 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 that ODL can describe ODL is described later in this manual Section 3 7 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 scenari
65. ENT 2 agerTask ROBOT_ID 2 119 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 120 DEFAULT TASK ObserveTask DEFAULT TASK WEIGHT 1 00 RUTIME CNP MISSION MANAGER TASK RuntimeCNPMissionManagerTask RUTIME CNP BIDDER TASK RuntimeCNPBidderTask 4 SUPPORT SOFTWARE 121 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 17 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 c
66. 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 FORMATION 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 f 1 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 89 3 7 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 follow
67. GER DESCRIPTION Supported by DetectSoundMotivated The transition occurs when the robot hears a sound AuRA urban and is suitably motivated This trigger combines sound capabilities and motivational variables Sec tion 3 1 12 When the current curiosity level of the robot is above a given threshold it behaves like De tectSound 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 FlagIsClear The transition occurs when the flag is not set AuRA urban FlagIsSet The transition occurs when the flag is set AuRA urban Holding The transition occurs when the robot is holding the AuRA naval specified object AuRA urban Immediate The transition occurs immediately without any condi AuRA naval tion AuRA urban InAlternateHallway The transition occurs when the robot enters the alter AuRA urban nate hallway InHallway Transition occurs when the robot is within a hallway AuRA urban InRoom Transition occurs when the robot is within a room AuRA urban IsFacing The transition occurs when the robot is facing a spec AuRA naval ified compass direction AuRA urban MarkedDoorway The transition occurs when the nearest doorway has AuRA urban been marked MessageSent The transition occurs immediately after a message has AuRA nava sent AuRA urban MovedDistance The transition occurs when the robot has mov
68. HIS PAIS IST RAST ma THIET a je E Rn 358 Rn 360 Objective WA Targets 23 11 20 80 DIG ton Mar 31 22 57 38 2008 Battery Hl 12 00 Y Conn Sane Telay 03 select n li F Ra 360A Copy Room Rn 362 Los A Joystick v House j Select Coordinate i 5 World Coord Deadman Robot Coord Switch Select Deloy Say Imediate Effect ctose Tetop Skip Haypoint y Delayed Effect _ lt onnit B 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 current coordinates of the robot itself along with the current date and time The Battery display shows the current voltage 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 T
69. ISSIONLAB TOOLS 47 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by GoToOutdoorNavigation The robot moves to the specified location with a swirling motion while avoiding obstacles AuRA naval AuRA urban GoToOutdoor_CBR This behavior is based on the GoToOutdoorNavi gation behavior As explained for GoTo_CBR be low the behavioral parameters are determined by a Case Based Reasoning system Note this CBR is to tally independent from the CBR used in CBRServer The only difference is that the avoid obstacle behavior is substituted by the swirl behavior AuRA urban GoToSoundSource The robot moves in the direction of the sound source AuRA urban GoTo_CBR This behavior is based on the normal GoTo behav ior Instead of the user handcoding the behavioral pa rameters it uses a Case Based Reasoning system for Behavioral Selection 11 12 Note this CBR is to tally independent from the CBR used in CBRServer The system keeps a set of such parameters in a li brary and chooses the one best fitting the current en vironment The library can be modifiable or hand coded In the first case the system can learn start ing from an empty library or improve an existing li brary 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 AuRA urban GoTo_Dstar
70. KET 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 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 81 3 6 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 o
71. 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 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 86 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
72. MissionLab User Manual for MissionLab version 7 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 July 12 2006 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 Patrick Ulam Alan Wagner This manual was compiled by Yoichiro Endo 111 Copyright 1994 2006 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 2006 Georgia Tec
73. NAME NAME ACTUATOR_NAME SENSOR_NAME i NUMBER NUMBER from AGENT_CLASS ParmSet from SorA ParmSet from 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 74 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS LHS MaybeAgent Rule MaybeName StartClsRef ClsRef InstRobot StartRobotInst InstCoord StartCoordInst RefRobot StartRefRobot RefCoord StartCoordRef RefSorA SorAclass StartSorARef StartSorAInst InstSorA RefBP InstBP RefGroup InstGroup LinkorAgent AgentList LHS PU INITIALIZER LHS Rule LHS INITIALIZER LHS LHS RobotLinks PARM_NAMB Loc PARM_NAME INDEX_NAME Loc PARM_NAME NAME Loc PARM_HEADER NAME Loc PARM_HEADER INDEX_NAME Loc PARM_HEADER PU_PARM_NAMB Loc Agent if MaybeAgent goto INDEX_NAME if MaybeAgent goto NAME INLINE_NAME MaybeName AGENT_CLASS StartClsRef ParmSet Loc StartRobotInst RobotParms instRobot Loc NAME from ROBOT_CLASS StartCoordInst ParmSet instOp Loc NAME from COORD_CLASS StartRefRobot RobotParms Loc MaybeName ROBOT_CLASS StartCoordRef ParmSet Loc MaybeName COORD_CLASS StartSorARef ParmSet Loc ACTUATOR_CLASS SENSOR _CLASS MaybeName SorA Loc INLINE_N
74. ON UGV lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME STEALTHINESS CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 1 CONSTRAINT OPTION STEALTHY CONSTRAINT OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS BEGIN gt 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS ROBOT CONSTRAINTS ROBOT 1D 2 lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME VEHICLE_TYPES CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 2 CONSTRAINT OPTION UAV CONSTRAINT OPTION USV CONSTRAINT OPTION UUV CONSTRAINT OPTION UGV lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME STEALTHINESS CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION O CONSTRAINT OPTION STEALTHY CONSTRAINT OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS END gt lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS BEGIN gt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS ROBOT 1D 3 lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME VEHICLE_TYPES CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION 2 CONSTRAINT OPTION UAV CONSTRAINT OPTION USV CONSTRAINT OPTION UUV CONSTRAINT OPTION UGV lt CONSTRAINT END gt lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME STEALTHINESS CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION O CONSTRAINT OPTION STEALTHY CONSTRAINT OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt CONSTRAINT END gt
75. PA under contract number DAAE07 98 C LO38 DARPA U S Army SMDC under contract number DASG60 99 C 0081 DARPA DOI contract number NBCH1020012 and NAVAIR Intelligent Autonomy program 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 2 1 Installing Missi nbab 4 Ta ass a AA a RR AE a 2 2 Running Quick Example Programs 00 0000 000 eee eee eee 3 The 3 1 2 2 1 2 2 2 Deol mlb A Ge a a gs eee e BEERS Demo 2 CfgHdit 5 4 ERA ORBEA BES eek MissionLab Tools mlab User Interface Console o 3 1 1 3 1 2 3 1 3 3 1 4 3 1 5 3 1 6 3 1 7 3 1 8 3 1 9 3 1 10 3 1 11 3 1 12 3 1 13 3 1 14 3 1 15 3 1 16 3 1 17 3 1 18 3 1 19 3 1 20 3 1 21 Staring Made Lic a a dd E rd mlab Command Line Arguments s es ss sa atina e ee EE X X Motif Resources for mlab o o e File Utilities si aee Gane be ee AE TAR a 8 Obstacle Creation Dialog Box 2 2 2 0 0 0000000000000 000004 World Scale Dialog Box aii b dc E Aa wees Oe We dd BO ae fe ae Time Scale Dialog Box 0 a a2 42 SDAA Aid eae Oe a a ts a Hy iaa Dynamically Changing the Environment e Command Interface Panel ii 40 ia A A Ras E Se ps Ete a a CMDLi Interface Panel ee ee Sound Simulations aae eeren aa 2 HAE Soy lel ae aa
76. PTION 1 FEATURE OPTION AIR FEATURE OPTION SURFACE FEATURE OPTION UNDERWATER FEATURE OPTION GROUND lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 2 FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE HIDE 0 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 80 FEATURE NAME MISSION_STEALTHINESS FEATURE OPTION TYPE O FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 1 FEATURE OPTION STEALTHY FEATURE OPTION NOT_STEALTHY lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 7 115 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 116 FEATURE NON INDEX 1 FEATURE HIDE 1 FEATURE WEIGHT 0 80 FEATURE NAME ROBOT_ID FEATURE OPTION TYPE 3 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 1 FEATURE OPTION N A lt FEATURE END gt lt FEATURE BEGIN gt FEATURE TYPE 5 FEATURE NON INDEX 0 FEATURE HIDE O FEATURE WEIGHT 0 80 FEATURE NAME MISSION FEATURE OPTION TYPE 0 FEATURE SELECTED OPTION 2 FEATURE OPTION CARGO_INSPECTION FEATURE OPTION TARGET_TRACKING FEATURE OPTION NMC FEATURE OPTION VESSEL_INTERCEPTION lt FEATURE END gt ne ei A pc a a ae ln A IN a a a II E AI A Robot Constraints ROBOT OPTION TYPE Same as FEATURE OPTION TYPE TOGGLE 0 SLIDER1 1 0 10 1 00 SLIDER1IO 2 1 10 EENE VE EAEE A A A A AA A A ety oe E Py lt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS BEGIN gt ROBOT CONSTRAINTS ROBOT ID 1 lt CONSTRAINT BEGIN gt CONSTRAINT TYPE 4 CONSTRAINT HIDE O CONSTRAINT NAME VEHICLE_TYPES CONSTRAINT OPTION TYPE O CONSTRAINT SELECTED OPTION O CONSTRAINT OPTION UAV CONSTRAINT OPTION USV CONSTRAINT OPTION UUV CONSTRAINT OPTI
77. T2aY2 Tn Yn Room This entry indicates a room object of the overlay It has the format Room Name 21 y T2a2Y2 Tn Yn where the coordinates describe the closed polygon When the robot is inside this polygon it can 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 Tn 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
78. _privileges Execute Modify Edit Create RealRobots Library MExpModifyCBRLib user_privileges Execute Modify Edit Create RealRobots MExpModifyCBRLib user_privileges Execute Modify Edit Create RealRobots Library 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 AuRA naval UGV restrict_names AuRA naval List of comma separated directories and root names of the CDL description libraries to load Will try to load xxx gen xxx AuRA and xxx UGV CDL_libraries MLAB_HOME 1ib default MLAB_HOME 1ib agents Optional Configuration to load as the empty config DefaultConfiguration MLAB_HOME 1ib FSA cdl DefaultConfiguration MLAB_HOME 1lib 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 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
79. ab 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 1 13 To simulate a sound the user is required to click inside the white disk labeled Sound Source Figure 26 After the 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 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 25 CMDLi Interface on o cc gatech edu im for mini demoRobot3 Wai ting for mini demoRobot3 ne for mini demoRobot3 El Immediate Effect Delayed Effect cossit u Figure 26 Sound Simulation Window 3 1 12 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 t
80. ad 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 x Disconnect Nomad Range Start Change sonar sensor fire rate Zero robot Calibrate Compass Ping Refresh screen 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 is not already connected then first press R to get a menu to connect the robot 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 102 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 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 cha
81. 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 37 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 This option specifies whether to disable premission CNP upon specifying a mission using Mission Expert Also this option should be set to False i e enabling Premission CNP if you want to display robots based on the configuration specified in ROBOT CONSTRAINTS section of mission_expertrc DisablePremissionCNP False This option specifies whether to disable runtime CNP upon specifying a mission using Mission Expert DisableRuntimeCNP False This option specifies whether to allow the user to alter the robot constraints via the M
82. ain 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 order to visualize Visibility chains the user must create a robot whose color is yellow assigning the yellow color identifies 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 1 23 Compass Window Figure 34 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 F
83. an goto Pick_up_can 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 73 The exact specification of the Configuration Description Language is defined below 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
84. and not familiar with how to update the kernel we recommend you to use Fedora Core 4 instead Note 3 The most common problem for compiling MissionLab is due to the fact the GNU compiler gcc g is too new The newest GNU compiler that MissionLab is known to compile with is gcc 4 1 Fedora Core 5 Please be aware that any compiler whose version is higher than 4 1 may fail to compile MissionLab Note 4 We noticed that LessTif version of Motif API for X Window GUI tends to produce various warnings during the operation of MissionLab and it even fails to show some of the widgets if executed from Fedora Core 5 Hence we recommend you to use Open Motif version of Motif Note 5 MissionLab requires a 3 button mouse to operate If you do not have a 3 button mouse make sure that emulation of 3 button is enabled 2 Make sure you have an enough disk space to install MissionLab 300 MB minimum 400 MB recommended 3 Obtain the latest MissionLab distribution if you haven t yet You can download the latest dis tribution of MissionLab MissionLab 7 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 IPT is an interprocess communication system developed at Carnegie Mello
85. anning 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 or the obstacles at any point The path planning module uses the A algorithm to find the path 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 The map file describes the 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 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
86. ation wedge formation and no formation 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 35 3 3 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 code and compile it to create a robot executable that can directly control a simulated or real robot 3 3 1 Reviewing the Configuration File Before running CfgEdit it would be useful to review the configuration file that specifies the configuration of CfgEdit You can find the default configuration file cfgeditrc in your MissionLab home sre cfgedit Note that since MissionLab 7 0 customization of the paths in this file is no longer necessary as the path for the individual MissionLab home is automatically acquired through the configure script during the installation see MLAB_PATH in src make include The following is the 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 the Waypoints function in the main menu Note Not MissionExpert true or false DisableWaypointsFunct
87. box i e Qfile not Qfile The ActionTimeout is how many time steps the algorithm will wait for something to happen before updating 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 63 Institute of Technology Instance of QLEARN nax_vel base_vel cautious_vel cautious_node OfileNane ActionTimeout Instance of camera Kind of Actuator c gedit v5 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology dialog_popup base_vel cautious_vel cautious_node Instance of canera Kind of Actuator pcx ics O W Figure 52 CfgEdit One of the triggers is selected C B A State 0 10 Jo O ojoj 1 o 1 fo 2 0 1 1 3 1 0 0 4 1 0 1 5 1 1 0 6 1f1 1 7 Table 3 Given three triggers from top to bottom A B C the table shows the resulting state 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 64 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 sample_qlean ovl in the same directory Kind of Assenblage Flags Instance of bas
88. cedure 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 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 17 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 betwee
89. 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 For the obstacle creation dialog box use MissionLab Obstacle 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 3 1 4 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 Open Mission 0 File Configure Command Options Compass Obstacles Scale Scale 00 0 m Mission Load Overlay Tine Restart pS Quit Change Environment 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 6 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 experimen
90. character 0x1B over the serial line press the escape key twice The followings are key commands that supported by the window d Disconnect terminal and close window e Erase terminal window h Toggle hex mode all data from the serial port is printed out in hexadecimal C Toggle cognachrome mode only outputs data received on the current watched stream c Change cog stream p Send q as saphira packet quits saphira mode on cognachrome r Refresh screen 1 Toggles log mode Terminal output is logged to hserver log file x Hide the terminal window e Remote 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 CfgyEdit 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 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 Oo B BW po Decrease the speed of the robot lt space gt Stop the robot movement u Stop the linear motion of the robot but continue on the angular motion o Stop the angular motion of t
91. con in the toolbox Place multiple WaypointTasks from StartPlace upto the Factory Entrance 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 112 e Click on the Biohazard icon in the toolbox e Place BiohazardTask in the hallway near the entrance e Click on the Finish button in the toolbox 3 Compile and run e When the mission is executed the robot will stop at the end of the hallway Then quit mlab e When asked click No to a successful mission and Yes to diagnosis 4 Identify the faulty part of the mission e mlab starts with the playback mode Jog the robot until it reaches the end of the hallway Figure 77 e Click Fix It in the toolbox e Click on The robot did not perform a necessary action at this point e Click on The robot has to turn around at the end of the hallway e Click Yes to apply the change 5 Compile and run again e In this time the robot should turn around at the end of the hallway and successfully finds the biohazard at one of the rooms File Configure Comand Options Conpass Scale Oluuluul W 0 m ission area is 304 0n by 253 00 Logfile Playback Controller a m gt i a X D o Task 3 aypointsTask AN l T e obstacle po ze ha Figure 77 mlab the playback mode 3 9 6 CBR CNP Integration Another new capability added to the CBR Wizard
92. ct 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 100 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 lt K ZS 4H Connect to a Crossbow DMU VGX gyroscope 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 e Terminal Window This window which pops up by pressing T 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
93. ctory to execute mlab However to be able to utilize MissionLab functions you need to be able to run mlab manually Take the following steps to run mlab 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 home 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 ho
94. d in relation to u_max_val and u_min_val according to the Mi croNavigation rules in order to allow a deeper explo ration of the environment when the robot cannot find a path to the goal AuRA urban InitializeCSB The robot initilizes the communication sensitive be havior AuRA urban Intercept The robot intercepts a moving object AuRA naval 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 49 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by LOS_GoTo Currently all the behaviors with the LOS Line Of Sight prefix can be used only in simulation The be havior 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 co operating team When no teammates are visible the robot moves towards a location specified in X Y co ordinates If a robot comes in sight of another robot they share information about their own targets 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 18 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 th
95. d 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 robot 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 robot included in this release numerous parameters can be given which control the operation of the robot s motor behaviors See Table 4 for details A detailed description of motor 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 82 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 co
96. der to enhance CMDL s capability for co ordinating multiple heterogeneous robots that are launched from multiple heterogeneous software platforms Georgia Tech s MissionLab University of Pennsylvania s ROCI and University of Southern California s Player Stage The interface itself Figure 25 is similar to the command interface panel described in the previous section In both cases a mission is written in a script like language CMDL However the differ ence is that unlike the previous command interface where mlab reads the instructions from the script and control robots by acting as a central command in CMDLi every robot has its own copy of the CMDL script and carries out the integrated mission in a distributed fashion If necessary the robots can be synchronized by CMDLi There are two example CMDLi missions provided in the MissionLab packages Follow the procedure below to execute those missions e To run the first demo All robots are launched from a single mlab process 1 cd your MissionLab home demos mars2020_demos 2 run mini demo e To run the second demo Multiple robots are launched from three different mlab processes 1 cd your MissionLab home demos mars2020_demos 2 cfgedit gtech cdl 3 compile but do not run 4 quit CfgEdit 5 cfgedit non gtech cdl 6 compile but do not run 7 quit CfgEdit 8 CopyDemoRobots 9 run big demo Press OK to proceed when asked 3 1 11 Sound Simulation MissionL
97. e Kind of Actuator Instance of QLEARN El 3 A triggers SE j nax_ve D 2 base_vel p 05 cautious_vel ind of Assemblage False cautious_node Instance of canera Kind of Actuator QfileNane savoid_obstacle_safety E ActionTimeout sox sensor ronne Figure 53 CfgEdit Sample Configuration for Q Learning 3 3 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 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 3 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 Descrip
98. e 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 58 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 59 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 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 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 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 The two points from Step 4 are passed as arguments to the path pl
99. e 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 constructing 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 CfgEdit 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 in Figure 48 Note 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 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 56 File Configure Command Options Compass Figure 43 mlab adding waypoints GoTo MtGoal GoTo Atoa GoTo Boal_Location 216 69 268 28 Goal Location lt 216 69 268
100. e corresponding colors AuRA urban 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 AuRA urban 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 mod ify are the ones described for the GoTo_MiNav state moreover you can specify the robots which should be considered as teammates by enabling the correspond ing colors AuRA urban LeaveRoom The robot leaves the room behind the nearest door using the docking behavior 1 AuRA urban Localize The robot localizes its current position to be the spec ified values AuRA naval AuRA urban 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 com posed with Start Immediate MoveForward MovedDistance AboutFace AboutFaceCom pleted Wait Stops and Detect
101. e size of the displayed robots is to be scaled with the world Tf 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 factor specifically the robots are shown as being as long in pixels as the Robot Length scale on the right indicates 3 1 7 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 21 World Scale 100 ol zoom Factor of nominal size 10 00 a Robot length meters Ok Apply Cancel Figure 21 The world scale dialog box Cycle duration seconds per cycle Ok Apply Cancel Figure 22 The time scale dialog box 3 1 8 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
102. ecognizes 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 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 640x480 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 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 104 3 9
103. ed 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 38 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 39 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 cannot 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 naval 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 naval file wi
104. ed a AuRA nava desired distance AuRA urban Near The transition occurs when the robot is near specified AuRA nava objects AuRA urban NearNotifiedObject The transition occurs when the robot is near the no AuRA nava tified object Never The transition does not occur It may be useful for AuRA nava debugging AuRA urban NoProgress The transition occurs when the robot is stuck and AuRA nava making no progress moving towards the specified goal AuRA urban NotAtEndOfHall The transition occurs when the robot is not near the AuRA urban end of the hallway NotDetected The transition occurs when the object once detected AuRA nava by the robot is no longer in sight AuRA urban NotHolding The transition occurs when the robot is not holding AuRA nava the specified object AuRA urban Notified The transition occurs when the robot receives a mes AuRA nava sage that was sent by the Notify state or the Noti AuRA urban fyRobot state both explained above Notified_ObjectLocation The transition occurs when the robot is notified about AuRA nava object location Proceed The transition occurs when the console commands to AuRA nava proceed the mission AuRA urban SetFlag The transition occurs immediately and this trigger AuRA urban sets the named flag to true 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 55 TRIGGER DESCRIPTION Supported by SkipGoal The transition occurs when skip waypoint button is
105. ehavior open sphere is the maximum distance in meters that obstacles are reacted to to deter mine the heading by the swirl behavior 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 naval 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 naval defAgent AuRA naval binds SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES Vector SWIRL_STATIC_OBSTACLES const double sphere 3 0 3 Construct Behavioral Assemblages 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 Copy this in both agents gen and agents AuRA naval 7 POR BGO ak Ak Ak k k k k k ak k k k k K k k k k ak ak kak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak IIa I AI AK K K K k GoTo_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 classes 0 Will avo
106. em 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 98 p pioneer_section d pioneer_section j su v framegrabber_section g gps_section Connect to a Pioneer AT described in the configuration file by pioneer section lt pioneer_section gt Connect to a Pioneer 2DX described in the configuration file by pioneer section lt pioneerd_section gt Connect to an ATRV Jr via mobility Connect to an RWI Urban Robot via mobility 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 8 3 Environment Variables For your convenience you
107. gher 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 36 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 3 4 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 41 Figure 37 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 4 To find out how each state and trigger is defin
108. ging 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 Emx CBRServer version 6 0 00 Communication Status Waiting for the first client connection i 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 106 3 9 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 a
109. gure 7 on page 10 Right clicking the state icon will popup a list of avaliable states By default the system is binded to AuRA naval architecure and available states are limited to naval applications To change the binding architecture to for example AuRA urban and create a mission using behaviors for urban applications you can modify the configuration file cfgedit and set restrict_names to be AuRA urban and DefaultConfiguration to be urban cdl The full list of the available states in MissionLab is shown in Table 1 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 which 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 The full list of the available states in MissionLab is shown in Table 2 For building the mission all the edit functions Copy Duplicate Cut Paste and Delete in the Edit menu are supported by CfgEdit If you make a mistake during the construction of the robot mission and you wish to start
110. h Research 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 DAR
111. hDoor The robot enters a nearest door it finds AuRA urban 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 presi 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 posi tion 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 that you can modify the gains of their prim itive behaviors that are incorporated into the state For example if you increase move_to_location_gain the attraction to the goal becomes larger while in creasing 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 ob stacle 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 AuRA naval AuRA urban GoToAvoidPast The robot moves to the specified locati
112. he E Stop Deadman Switch using a real joystick The cause a transition in the FSA if such a trigger was used Finally the button is the emergency stop button which will halt the robot if it is pressed Next to it is the which does nothing if clicked with the mouse but will be explained later in the context of Skip Waypoint telop interface and end teleoperation Close Telop button will cause the AtOrSkipGoal trigger to become true and button will remove the 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 27 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 o
113. he robot but continue on the linear motion 10Note that because HServer uses ncurses there is an unavoidable delay associated with the escape character N Q O n Aap s O x THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 101 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 Turn 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 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 s ab Disconnect the robot Synch Sonar Type Supported by Pioneer AT 2DX only Turn on off sonar sensors Speed Factor Decrement Increment Angular Speed Factor Decrement Increment Refresh screen 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 Nom
114. he user through the use of the motivational vector interface Figure 27 This interface can be invoked from the Command menu Please note that this is similar to the Personality Interface Section 3 1 14 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 2 which explains the difference between these two types of robots The behaviors that utilize this motivational variables are listed in Section 3 3 4 3 1 13 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Motivational Vector Curiousity Close Window Figure 27 Motivational Vector Window 26 MissionLab package are implemented with Telop capability which allow users to maneuver robots with a joystick like interface Figure 28 The Teleautonomous Operation Telop interface can be invoked by choosing the fourth entry Telop Interface of Command menu Zimix Joystick Figure 28 Telop Interface Help Refresh Pause zoon 100 y a Se t 0 ye T
115. hting 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 1 17 Movement 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 1 18 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 31 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 30 Help Scale Ol hy 1 0 m Mission
116. ia TCP IP mobility required e X server via local or TCP IP 3 8 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 sections 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 9 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 95 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
117. id everything swirl_obstacle_sphere swirl_obstacle_safety_margin swirl_obstacle_open_space swirl_obstacle_open_sphere max_sensor_range 1000 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 naval 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 69 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 Daka Ek k kk kkk kkk kkk kkk kk kkk kkk kkk 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 Telop 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 naval you will find the definition for M
118. 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 9 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 y e Map Based Mission Input Specifier mlab Requirements Preference Additional 4 Changes Executable Mission Roboit s FSA Based Mission User Composer CfgEdit Requirements sack Mission Plan Preference Mission Plan Database amp Mission Planning Engine CBRServer Figure 64 Mission Expert processes mlab CfgEdit and CBRServer 3 9 2 Invoking CBRServer CBRServer takes the following command line arguments cbrserver dh s socket name 1 library name 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 105 modification of a constraints preferences suggested plan constraints preferences constraints preferences mezon ballpark plan solutions 1 t I Li i Li i constraints 4 preferences Li Li t 1 1 Li t i Li Domain mission plan Manager Figure 65 Interactions among the user mlab CfgEdit and internal modules of CBRServer d enables the debugging mode and it will dump debug
119. igure 34 Compass Window 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 33 3 1 24 3D Display MissionLab has the capability to represent three dimensional heightmapped terrain In order to utilize this feature a heightmap datafile must exist in the current working directory This file should be an 8 bit raw greyscale image The standard linux utility ImageMagik is capable of converting images to this format e g run convert filename tif filename gray and then mv filename gray filename hm In this image light areas corespond to elevated regions and dark areas corespond to lower elevation In order to use this heightmap a heightmap command should be included in the overlay file The format of the heightmap command is as follows HEIGHTMAP heightmap filename heightmap width heightmap height sea level scale The heightmap width and height should match that of the mission area The sea level parameter indicates that all elevation units equal to or below that value are water The scale parameter should under normal circumstances be 1 0 The three dimensional view of the mission area can be accessed during mission execution through the Show 3d Visualization dialog under the Options menu The 3d scene can be translated scaled or rotated by dragging the mouse while clicking the left middle and right button respectively A sample mission in which the robot navigates in a 3D environment Figure 35 can be found in your MissionLab home demos ao fnc_demos
120. iled AuRA nava CNP_LostTask The transition occurs when the robot loses a task AuRA nava CNP_TaskChanged The transition occurs when the task constrains change AuRA nava CNP_TaskCompletionNotified The transition occurs when completion of the CNP AuRA nava task is notified CNP_TaskRenegingNotified The transition occurs when reneging of the CNP task AuRA nava is notified CNP_WonTask The transition occurs when the robot wins a task AuRA nava CNP_WonTaskIs The transition occurs when the robot won a specified AuRA nava task Detect The transition occurs when the robot detects the ob AuRA nava ject specified AuRA urban Detect AlternateHallway The transition occurs when the robot detects a inter AuRA urban section of hallways DetectFriendlyRobots The transition occurs when the robot detect a robot AuRA urban which is considered as a teammate You must specify in the parameters the color of the robots which should be considered as teammates DetectMotivated The transition occurs when the robot sees an object AuRA urban 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 AuRA urban having higher volume than the volume threshold 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 54 TRIG
121. in 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 zero 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 90 3 7 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
122. ing descriptions items in italics would be replaced by appropriate values from the user 3 7 1 Scenario Information Part The scenario information part is the first part of the file and includes any of the following items 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 orig
123. ion false Disable Path Planner true or false DisablePathPlanner true Disable Honeywell Real Time Analyzer true or false DisableHoneywellRTAnalyzer true Disable MissionExpert true or false DisableMissionExpert false Disable MissionExpert s repairment feature true or false DisableMissionExpertRepair false Hide the MissionExpert menu even if the function itself enabled true or false HideMissionExpertMenu false Disable AssistantDialog true or false DisableAssistantDialog true Hide AssistantDialog upon starting of CfgEdit true or false HideAssistantDialog false Specify where the message file for Assistant Dialog is stored AssistantDialogMsgDir MLAB_HOME src assistantDialog MessageFiles Specify where 3D models are saved The symbolic link is pointed to this file from your MissionLab home bin 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 36 Vis3DModelDir MLAB_HOME src terrain models 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 components 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
124. ission Expert s user interface If this set to True as it should be the robot constraints specified in mission_expertrc by experts will be used DisallowModCNPRobots True The first robot s start position It has to be defined as PP If it is commented default StartPlace will be used FirstRobotStartPlace StartPlace 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 0 Extra robots to add to the run ExtraRobots Enemy robots SentryRoboti red robot_type HOLONOMIC run_type SIMULATION extra_robot ExtraRobots Enemy enemyRoboti red robot_type HOLONOMIC run_type SIMULATION extra_robot true 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 ExtraRobotStartPlace EnemyStartPlace Offsets to start extra robots at This is for the 2nd and later extra robots 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 38 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
125. k 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Table 2 Available Triggers in MissionLab 53 TRIGGER DESCRIPTION Supported by AboutFaceCompleted The transition occurs when the robot faces in the op AuRA naval posite direction AuRA urban Alerted The transition occurs when the alert message has sent AuRA naval AuRA urban AtDoorway The transition occurs when the robot detects a door AuRA urban way AtEndOfHall The transition occurs when the robot reaches the end AuRA urban of the hallway AtGoal The transition occurs when the robot is at the specified AuRA naval location You can also specified a tolerance of which AuRA urban how far the robot can be off from the goal location AtGoalInFormation The transition occurs when a group of robots is at the AuRA urban specified location and forming a specified formation AtOrSkipGoal The transition occurs when the robot is at goal or AuRA urban asked to skip goal by the user AwayFrom The transition occurs when the robot is away from AuRA naval specified objects AuRA urban ClearF lag The transition occurs immediately and this trigger AuRA urban clears the named flag to false CNP_AuctionReady The transition occurs when the robot has a task for AuRA nava bid CNP_IsAuctionEnded The transition occurs when the auction ended AuRA nava CNP _IsAuctionFailed The transition occurs when the auction fa
126. le Configure Command Options Compass Scale Oly 1 0 m Hission area is 45 0m by 45 00 Pause Zoom 100 y a East Entry fa 361 Hob fa hobi Labia bi CIWS 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 new installation Follow these steps to create a simple 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 IA _ Figure 3 CfgEdit Window 4 Move to a FSA diagram e 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 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 8 Click here with
127. les 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 pressing 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 Obstacle Coverage 2 00 JT Min obstacle radius m 10 00 meg Max obstacle radius m Seed 69135 Accept Generate new seed Auto Randomize Ok Apply Cancel Clear Obstacles Figure 20 The obstacle creation dialog box 3 1 6 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 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 al zoom in and zoom out buttons just below the right end of the menu bar The Scale Robots toggle controls whether th
128. 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 landmark 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 60 WALLS 32 3 75 17 3 16 85 17 3 16 85 16 2 14 3 16 2 14 3 17 1 11 67 17 Bb 00 w N e ee wwere nke OBSTACLES 3 15 0 11 0 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 Conte
129. ll 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 40 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 naval 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 libenl 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 39 and the CNL code will pop up as shown in Figure 41 See Section 3 5 for details on CNL 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 42 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 avoid_obstacle_sphere weight pushed up avoid_obstacle_safety pushed up pushed up
130. llisions 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_mode 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
131. lt 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 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
132. ly users cannot choose multiple directories for 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
133. map if so This file has to be deleted if an other mission is to be run on a different overlay Fu ture 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 AuRA urban 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 48 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by GoTo_LM This behavior is an alteration of the GoTo state Instead of using static values for the state parame ters the move to goal gain avoid obstacle gain wan der gain avoid obstacle sphere of influence and wan der persistence are continuously changed at mission run time using a Learning Momentum LM algo rithm 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 algo rithm for example to switch to a squeezing strat egy it is necessary to alter the source file mlab di rectory 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
134. minate The robot will terminate its own process AuRA nava AuRA urban TerminateObject The robot terminates the nearest red object AuRA nava AuRA urban TerminateMission The entire mission will be terminated AuRA nava AuRA urban TestObject The robot performs a test to identify the object The AuRA nava user can use the TestPositive or TestNegative trig AuRA urban ger both explained below to get out from the state and move on to next one TrackTarget The robot follows the target while taking a certain AuRA naval distance UAV_Move_To_Goal The robot moves to a specified location assuming its AuRA naval mobility is UAV UAV _Move_To_Notified The robot moves to a notified location assuming its AuRA naval mobility is UAV UnmarkDoorway The robot unmarks the nearest doorway AuRA urban UpdateCSBSensorData The robot updates the sensor data for the communi AuRA urban cation sensitive behavior WaitForProceed The robot stops moving until proceeding mission is AuRA naval granted AuRA urban Wander The robot moves in random directions AuRA naval AuRA urban WanderRoom This state also contains nested sub FSA states and AuRA urban triggers Assuming that the robot is in a room the robot tries to moves randomly while it tries to main tain being inside the room until a timer expires WanderRoom is composed of the following sub FSA states and triggers Start Immediate Wan der InRoom EnterRoom InHallway Wait and ExitTas
135. mitation 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 FORMATION 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 bef
136. mlab will use the overlay listed under Default Overlay e Pause Before Execution If this check box is set mlab will bring up a dialog box pausing the execution of the mission until the dialog box button is pressed e Log Robot Data If this option is selected the robot logs its runtime data See Section 3 1 20 for more details on the robot data logging e Show Robot Status If this option is selected the status of the robot showing its current state will be displayed e Enable Runtime CNP If the mission contains the runtime CNP behaviors and this option is turned on the robots will attempt to bid for tasks during the execution e Enable 3D If the overlay contains the 3D information accompanied by the height map Section 3 1 24 the mlab will display the robot and environment in 3D 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 Mission Expiration Time sec If the user wishes to force mlab to terminate the mission and quit its process after a certain time the expiration time in seconds can be specified in this box It can be useful for conducting a repetitive experiment e Run Pressing this button will cause cfgedit to first write out a cmdl file Section 3 6 in the current directory Usually the CMDL file will be named afte
137. 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 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 114 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 FEATURE TYPE also used for CONSTRAINT TYPE below CBR GLOBAL 0 CBR
138. n University Also see the file README IPT This release of the MissionLab was developed with version 8 4 of IPT If you wish you can obtain the package from ftp ftp cs cmu edu user jayg download ipt 8 4 tar gz and IPTManual ps gz Due to copyright restrictions IPT MAY NOT BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES e CThreads CThreads is a lightweight process threads package from Georgia Tech which operates under Linux SunOS and many other OSs If you wish you can download the package from http www cc gatech edu systems projects Cthreads GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 5 e CMDLi Developed by Mobile Intelligence Corporation CMDLi is a communication package that coordinates heterogeneous robotic software platforms For example a mission involving robots launched from Georgia Tech s MissionLab Linux University of Pennsylvania s ROCI Windows and University of Southern California s Player Stage Linux can be simultaneously coordinated via CMDLi For more details on CMDLi contact Mobile Intelligence Corporation directly http www mobile intelligence com 4 Unpack the MissionLab distribution Uncompress and untar the distribution with the following command tar xvzf MissionLab 7 0 tar gz You should see a directory named MissionLab 7 0 This directory will be referred to as the Mission Lab home directory 5 Compile Compile MissionLab with the following commands cd your MissionLab home src configure make all
139. n 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 6 1 Mission background information part 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 values keyg valuez where Name is the name of the robots to be use
140. n 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 synchronization is explicitly generated by the CNL compiler and need not be specified by the user 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 78 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 valli center x repuls y readings val i 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 79 include cnl inc modulename
141. nces_10 swirl_obstacle_open_space open_sphere Distances_10 swirl_obstacle_open_sphere goal_rel_loc lt 10 50 gt GoalRelLoc readings lt 10 81 gt ListOfObstacles lt 393 26 gt swirl obstacles 1 lt 66 36 gt Swirl obstacles Pepa OOOO OOOO kk kk kkk kk kk kkk 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 naval 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 src overlays Empty ovl 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 70 cp your MissionLab home src 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 BigOb
142. nd choose GoTo left click from the list Figure 8 e 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 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 10 poo Tel En po Be I mnara Figure 8 CfgEdit modifying the state dada Figure 9 CfgEdit the GoTo state added 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 11 e Type in a goal location in the world coordinate for example to be X 10 and Y 20 Figure 10 Foo 1 tev Start 0 e L MEE Ee IEE T topin Ea Figure 10 CfgEdit specifying a goal location 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 Go To state and release it You will find a trigger connected between those two states Figure 11 If you click the Add Triggers button by mistake you can cancel this process by selecting Cancel in the Layout menu 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 The trigger connected between the first GoTo state and the second GoTo state should have automatically appeared as AtGoal a
143. nd 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 middle click on it like you did for the state Figure 13 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 6 Save the Back_and_Forth Robot Configuration 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 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 You will see a pop up window Figure 15 showing compilation progress Left click OK when the compilation is finished 8 Running the Back_and_Forth Robot 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 12 uo 4 Level fans S A ara Eee Fmatyzs ME al Figure 11 CfgEdit a trigger added eeik ke ETE Figure 12 CfgEdit a list of triggers can been seen by right clicking on one of the triggers you created 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB
144. ngs 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 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
145. nnels 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 add 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 r 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 LA Set channel to train and view Train on center color Incremental train center Shrink grow colors 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 103 d z x Save Restore EPROM Toggle crosshairs Adjust filter level Level 0 r
146. nts 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 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 28 73 17 95 1 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 28 92 13 98 1 0 0 45 0 40 0 23 0 5 Each line describes one 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 3The 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 61 Figure 49 Path Planner Window an obstacle exists in the middle of the room x move_to_location_gain avoid_obstacle_gain avoid_obstacle_sphere avoid_obstacle_safety_margin Goal_Tolerance An example demo script to launch the CfyEdit configured for Path Planner can be found in your Mis sionLab home demos honda_demos Run demo_planner Known Bugs Currently there is no way to specify which map file to use with the planner
147. o bidder robots in the mission area e Click on the Finish button in the toolbox 3 View compile and run e By descending down the configuration take a look how the mission is composed e During the execution the leader robot goes around to the spots where the mines are and starts an auction to allocate the mine clearning job for the spot The highest bidder among the worker robots will execute the job In this case bids are calcuated based on the geographical location of the mine and robot 3 9 7 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_expertre 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 O If it is used as the index for the case based reasoning FEATURE WEIGHT specifies how
148. oes 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 hardware 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 Pioneer 2DX 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 v
149. ompiler instantiates each node primitive behavior as a separate thread 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 122 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 When compiled on Fedora Core 5 CfgEdit Widgets may not be displayed properly if LessTif is used as the Motif package 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 current
150. on while be ing repulsed by locations which it has already vis ited 5 This allows the robot to explore the envi ronment by escaping from local minima In partic ular the robot stores in memory a map of the en vironment 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 corre sponding 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 num ber of cells around the robot that are considered when computing the repulsive force avoid_past_horizon cor respond 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 compu tation step avoid_past_mark correspond to the side of a square area centered on the robot the dimen sion 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 new grid centered on the robot is stored in memory which only partially overlaps with the previ ous 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 AuRA urban 3 THE M
151. ons appear as the list of rules A named instance of an agent used multiple places is created with the instAgent command or instOp for 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 naval 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_c
152. oordinator from the list of operators 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 62 after click on Operator button Figure 50 Connect the output of the QLEARN coordinator to the Wheel Actuator icon Figure 51 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 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 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
153. ore 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 is 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 88 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
154. os 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 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 For version 4 0 a number of rob
155. ot behaviors were added for urban warfare operations DARPA TMR and a new tool HServer which can control various robot and sensor hardware was created In DARPA MARS project the focus of our research was addition of a framework to MissionLab that enables robots to synthesize the desirable features and capabilities of both deliberative symbol mediated and reactive sensor mediated control The research involved 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 In DARPA MARS 2020 project we have conducted studies on integrating MissionLab into a larger robotic system involving coordination of the robots that are launched from different software platforms such as University of Pennsylvania s ROCI and University of Southern California s Player Stage Mobile Intelligence Corporation s CMDLi was integrated into MissionLab in order to coordinate the communica tion among those heterogeneous robots Furthermore communication sensiti
156. otion 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 the 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 pro
157. oveToGoal because its Move to goal behavior was being used by the GoTo state The weight for each behavior is specified by the line weigh 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 naval 7 DOBRO OO OOOO OIG GIGI kk kkk kkk kkk Swirl_Obstacles Goal_Location swirl_obstacle_sphere 7 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 Dista
158. over left click the 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 Figure 42 CfgEdit modifying parameters for the GoTo state 3 3 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 might 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS Table 1 Available States in MissionLab 45 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by AboutFace The robot faces in the opposite direction from the orig AuRA naval inal AuRA urban Alert The robot alerts the user by sending a specified mes AuRA naval sage The user will received the message by the pop up AuRA urban window on the mlab console and if specified by email AssistedGoTo The robot behaves as same as the GoTo state ex AuRA urban plained below as long as the
159. pecified 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 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 Y 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 Yi TaY2 Ln Yn Note that the friendly forces are assumed to be on the right side of this line heading
160. piled 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 directly 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 8 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 9 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 6 e ODL The Overlay Description Language O
161. r 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 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 8 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 Syst
162. r the name of the CfgEdit configuration that the user specified with Save As option without 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 CfgEdit will then execute fork mlab starting the mission If the user wishes the same mission can be executed directly from a command line mlab r lt CMDL file name gt e Cancel Pressing this button closes the dialog box without running the mission or saving the running options to a CMDL file 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 67 3 3 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 you declare those in your Mission Lab home src libenl cnl inc Programming in CNL is explained in Section 3 5 and for details plea
163. re 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 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 Axis This entry indicates an axis of advance It has the format Axis Name z y 22 Yo Ln 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 91 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 s
164. ring dev ttySO 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 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 96 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 Defau
165. robot is progressing to wards 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 CNP_BidOnTask The robot bids on a CNP task AuRA nava CNP_ExecuteWonTask The robot execute the CNP task that it just won AuRA nava CNP _InjectTask The robot injects a CNP task to the CNP initiator AuRA nava CNP_NotifyTaskCompleted The robot notifies to the console that the CNP task AuRA nava was completed CNP_NotifyTaskReneged The robot notifies to the console that the CNP task AuRA nava was reneged CNP_NotifyWonTaskStarted The robot notifies to the console that the CNP task AuRA nava that just won was started CNP _SaveDynConstraints_Track The robot saves the dynamic constraints for CNP AuRA nava Track task CNP _SaveTargetLocation The robot saves the location of the target for CNP AuRA nava CNP_SaveTarget VehicleType The robot saves the vehicle type of the target for CNP AuRA nava CNP_SaveTarget Velocity The robot saves the velocity of the target for CNP AuRA nava ChangeMot Vector This task will increase decreases the values for the mo AuRA urban tivational vector variables See Section 3 1 12 ChangeRobotColor This task will change the di
166. s 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 cd 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 Expert e Open up another 3rd terminal window e Go to the same mars_demos directory e Run CfgEdit with the specified configuration file Note the CBR Wizard should load the mission_expertrce found in the current directory not the one from your MissionLab home bin cfgedit c config cbr e Choose New Robot in the first dialog box 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
167. s 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 1 15 Robot Trails There are a few miscellaneous options you can toggle from the Options menu Figure 30 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 Georgia Institute of Technology Command Options Compass y Shou robot Trails ca k 1000 0m Highlight repelling obstacles H Shou movenent vectors Y Shoe sovesent field Shou obstacles Erase obstacles Learning Honentun Data Logging Debug Laser and sonar display Shou Line Of Sight Debug sinulator D Debug robots R Debug robot scheduler S Report current state AAT AAA Figure 30 The options and debug menu 3 1 16 Obstacle Highlig
168. s 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 robots 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 1 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 3 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 4 and CNL is explained in Section 3 5 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 com
169. se 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 cnl 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 naval files The default gen and default AuRA naval 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 cni had been already used by the GoTo state you can find in default gen and default AuRA naval that the inputs for the behaviors are defined as In default gen defAgent displacement MOVE_TO boolean have_a_goal location goal_rel_loc In default AuRA naval defAgent AuRA naval binds MOVE_TO Vector MOVE_TO boolean have_a_goal
170. splay color of the robot in AuRA nava mlab AuRA urban DropObject The robot puts the carrying object into the closest AuRA nava object EnterAleternateHallway The robot enters an adjoining hallway using the dock AuRA urban ing behavior 1 The direction of the robot heading is chosen randomly after passage EnterRoom The robot enters a room through the nearest door us AuRA urban ing the docking behavior 1 It can be specified to enter the room through either an unmarked door or any door Exit Task This state is usually used in a sub FSA state For ex AuRA naval ample the SurveyRoom state Figure 40 contains AuRA urban 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 Exit Task 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 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 AuRA naval robot AuRA urban 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 46 STATE DESCRIPTION Supported by FollowCMDLiCommands The robot follows the CMDLi commands AuRA urban FollowCSBAdvise The robot follows the communication sensitve behav ior advise AuRA urban GoThroug
171. st is via a command line argument which is explained later 2 mlab is now ready to be run Move to the appropriate directory and bring up the user interface console by running mlab mlab At this point the user interface for displaying the scenario and controlling its operation should be popped 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 y 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 y Zoom out and a 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 17 Menu Bar MissionLab 6 0 00 c Georgia Institute of Technology EEE File Configure Command Options Compass Scale 0 100 0 m Mission area is 1000 0m by 101 Pause Zoom 100 y A Display area Scroll bar Figure 18 mlab MissionLab User Interface Console
172. stacle 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 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 EE anars 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 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 3 11 Using Mission Expert The Mission Expert functionality is explained in Section 3 9 Page 104 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 71 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 Olh 1 0 Mission area is 45 0 by 45 0u Refresh Pause Zoom 100 y A
173. t 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 string 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 6 Robot definition parameter keywords for REAL robot execution SET DEBUG ROBOTS ON OFF
174. t include ipt No such file or directory 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 However since MissionLab can now aquire the path for MLAB_HOME automatically when the configure script is executed during the installation this problem should occur less frequently 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
175. t with The details of ODL are explained in Section 3 7 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 1 5 Obstacle Creation Dialog Box 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 20 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 sca
176. the startup parameters for that robot The robot names are 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 39 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 90 qu drive_wait_angle adjust_obstacles use_sonar 1 use_laser 1 use_cognachrome 1 Wait_for_ack 0 multiple_hservers 0 3 3 2 Running CfgEdit 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 and or your MissionLab home src overlays directory The full form is cfgedit options CDL file As for mlab all of the argguments are optional The main argument 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 following options are supported by CfgEdit a Enable the automatic execution If used with the Mission Expert mode the whole mission specifica
177. tion Language file that contains information of the mission you created will be bound to your MissionLab home lib agents AuRA naval file that contains 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 65 e 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 libcnl 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 Run 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 Options for defaultRobot1 2 Simulated robot v HServer 4 FTP Robot Executable Renote Host Computer J Ask for Overlay Pause Before Execution Log Robot Data Shou Robot Status Enable Runtime CNP Enable 3D Default Overlay Empty ovl ission E
178. tion process including compilation and execution can be automated Useful for an experiment using the CBR Wizard c filename Use a specified configuration file instead of cfgeditrc e filename Enable event logging Use the specified file l 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 M string Enable the Mission Expert mode The specified string is to name output files 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 u The verbose mode This option will print out the modes you set up in the cfgeditrc file when you run CfgEdit 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 40 3 3 3 Browsing the Configuration Tree 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
179. tn OtherBtn TASK MAX USAGE The number of times this task can be placed The value should be an integer or inf for infinite number TASK RUNTIME CNP 118 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS If the task is used for runtime CNP The value is 0 false or 1 true Default is 0 AS EAS pe hd pi vp Ce est E in A po el bake al pee BS EE E lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME ObserveTask TASK BUTTON NAME ObserveBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE inf lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME EODTask TASK BUTTON NAME MineOceanBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE inf lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME InterceptTask TASK BUTTON NAME InterceptBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE 1 lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME InspectTask TASK BUTTON NAME InspectBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE 1 lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME TrackTask TASK BUTTON NAME TrackBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE inf lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME RuntimeCNPMissionMan TASK BUTTON NAME OtherBtn TASK MAX USAGE inf TASK RUNTIME CNP 1 lt TASK END gt lt TASK BEGIN gt TASK NAME RuntimeCNPBidderTask TASK BUTTON NAME OtherBtn TASK SPECIFIC SELECTED OPTION TASK MAX USAGE inf TASK RUNTIME CNP 1 lt TASK END gt ENVIRONMENT O ENVIRONMENT 1 ENVIRONMENT O ENVIRONMENT 1 ENVIRONM
180. to the actual color of the robot since in simulation the vision system of the robot recognizes different team mates on the basis of their color This color can be set when running the mission from cfgedit or by modify ing the CMDL file which is given as an input to the mlab command AuRA urban Standby The robot stands by to proceed the mission after checking its motor The motor test failure will be noti fied to the user This state has nested sub FSA states See the description for the SurveyRoom task below regarding the notation AuRA urban 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 SubMission Ready trigger as a pair If SubMissionReady is set to be DEPLOY_FIRST StartSubMission will make the robot to go to the designated loca tion If SubMissionReady is set to be EXE CUTE_IMMEDIATELY the state immediately after SubMissionReady will be executed i e the robot will not go to the deployment position Upon stor ing the mission plan CBRServer will treat StartSub Mission as a marker to indicate the break point of splitting the mission plan in useful pieces AuRA naval AuRA urban StayWith The robot stays with this object AuRA naval AuRA urban Stop The robot stops moving AuRA naval AuRA urban 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 52
181. 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 speci fication AuRA urban GoTo_MiNav The robot moves to the specified location while ex ploring the environment according to the MicroNav igation behaviors 16 In particular the robot can be in two states Avoid Obstacle and Follow Contour When in the 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 con tour of obstacles until it thinks it safe to start head ing 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 obsta cles 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 determine
182. ve behaviors comminication recovery communication preservation and internalized plan were developed for this project and HServer s localization capability was improved by incorporating probabilistic sensor fusion methods Extented Kalman Filter Particle Filter etc In ongoing NAVAIR Intelligent Autonomy project we are improving the mission specification process by combining the CBR Wizard with an auction based task allocation algorithm Contract Net Protocol 2 GETTING STARTED WITH MISSIONLAB 4 2 Getting Started with MissionLab 2 1 Installing MissionLab The following explains the procedure for how to install MissionLab on your machine 1 Ensure you have an appropriate operating system We have successfully compiled and tested MissionLab with the following operating systems e Red Hat Linux 9 0 e Fedora Core 3 4 and 5 e Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS Note 1 The default installation of a RedHat Linux system may not include all of the packages necessary to compile MissionLab Upon installing Linux we recommend you to select all the packages labeled under Development Tools X Window System X Software Development and Legacy Software Support Note 2 If you installed Fedora Core 5 straight from the installation disks MissionLab may not compile due to the problem in the kernel 2 6 15 In this case we recommend you to update your kernel to at least 2 6 17 and other software packages by running yum If you are new to Linux
183. vements 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 An example personality file called personality_file can be found in your MissionLab home demos mlab 2 0 demos directory The format of the personality file is a single line 1 Currently the personality function is only implemented in the manually coded type robots mlab 2 0 robot tmr robot 1998 which are explained in Section 3 2 Thus it does not apply for the CfgEdit type robot 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 28 Personality Aggressiveness 50 es SE Wander lust Close Window Figure 29 Personality Window that indicates the number of personality sliders followed by groups of information for each personality The group for each personality contains a title 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 the example file Number of sliders 2 title Aggressiveness num_params 2
184. verride 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 87 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 teleoperation 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 depressed
185. 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 3 9 2 3 9 5 Repairing a Faulty Mission Using the Playback Function One of the new capabilities added to the CBR Wizard since MissionLab 7 0 is the automated repair mecha nism introduced in 15 Here the user can attempt to fix a mission that fails to achived the user s desired objective by retrieving a repair plan from the CBRServer The example below shows how to use this capa bility 1 Run the demo scrip e Go to the demo directory cd your MissionLab home demos usability_demos 2004 e Make sure there is an example CBR library file usability test 2004 cbl e Run the script to start the CBRServer and CfgEdit processes demo_cbr 2 Create a Biohazard Mission e When CfgEdit asks select New Robot and Yes for Mission Expert Select factory ovl as the overlay e Set MaxVelocity to be 0 90 Click on the Waypoints i
186. watch 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 arrival 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 SExcept 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 2 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 87 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 li
187. when the planner is called from CfgEdit 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 robot s position The apparent jump has no effect on the mission other than leaving a robot trail as seen on Figure 48 3 3 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 Delete function Choose the QLEARN c
188. xecutions of 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 22 y2 REMOVE OBSTACLE As above the region is the rectangle defined by x1 y1 and 2 y2 All obstacles within the rectangle will be deleted 3 1 9 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 Configure Command Options Compass aaa Command Interface e CHDLi Inler fure I Sound Simulation Motivational vector Telop Interface Personality ission area i Figure 23 The command menu 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 3 THE MISSIONLAB TOOLS 23 Command i lt Type in a command here gt File overwatch_capitol Load File Rewind Commands al gt Execute Commands Single Step Single Step Robots Resune ABORT Executing Step 4 UNIT red team MoveTo PP P3b FORMATION Column Traveling Next
189. xpiration Time sec Figure 54 CfgEdit 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 options are defined in the cfgeditrc file Section 3 3 1 These 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 CfgEditis therefore equipped with the capability of transferring the binary 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 Tf your remote machine is for example cartman cc gatech edu and your RemoteShellUserName is demo your netrc file

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