Rescue Robot

Our rescue robot has two flippers each on the front and back sides to help it navigate the complicated terrain during disaster rescue. Previously these were controlled manually by the teleoperator.

I designed an algorithm to automatically determine the optimum flipper position based on a model of the surroundings constructed from lidar outputs.

It uses the Pointclouds gathered by the lidar and geometry to determine what the contact point on the flipper should be and set the angle accordingly.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) acts as a middleware to store and relay all the communication between different systems on the robot.

Here is a video demonstration of it working in simulation.