Significant progress
I've made some awesome progress on my simulator for my thesis. I think I'm ready to move on to the hardware implementation (the hard part).
I put the simulator together using MASON, a platform which facilitates multi-robot simulator creation. I've included a few screenshots for you guys to see a bit of what I'm doing. The basic idea is I'm trying to use multiple autonomous robots to locate a "hidden" transmitter (i.e. the robots don't know where it is). The transmitter is sending out radio waves and the tracker robots need to find him via these radio waves.
Here you can see the robots and the transmitter they're supposed to be tracking. The robots are green and the transmitter is blue. The white-black gradient is where the robots will be making their formation.
Here you can see one method of location. In this case I'm just plotting the radii at which the transmitter could be from each of the robots. Note that the transmitter is right at the point where they all intersect. Unfortunately, this method is not so likely to work in practice due to various problems with the way radio waves are reflected off surfaces.
This is using a method called TDOA (Time Delay Of Arrival). The purple dots are possible locations of the transmitter-- again, the transmitter is at the intersection point.
Here are a couple more screen shots from both methods. You can see that in the TDOA ones there is a small white-ish circle around the transmitter-- that's where the robots think he is. A larger circle means a higher degree of uncertainty.
And that's the very basics of what I'm doing for my thesis. So, the simulator is essentially done, now I just have to make it work on the hardware robots.
I put the simulator together using MASON, a platform which facilitates multi-robot simulator creation. I've included a few screenshots for you guys to see a bit of what I'm doing. The basic idea is I'm trying to use multiple autonomous robots to locate a "hidden" transmitter (i.e. the robots don't know where it is). The transmitter is sending out radio waves and the tracker robots need to find him via these radio waves.
Here you can see the robots and the transmitter they're supposed to be tracking. The robots are green and the transmitter is blue. The white-black gradient is where the robots will be making their formation.
Here you can see one method of location. In this case I'm just plotting the radii at which the transmitter could be from each of the robots. Note that the transmitter is right at the point where they all intersect. Unfortunately, this method is not so likely to work in practice due to various problems with the way radio waves are reflected off surfaces.
This is using a method called TDOA (Time Delay Of Arrival). The purple dots are possible locations of the transmitter-- again, the transmitter is at the intersection point.
Here are a couple more screen shots from both methods. You can see that in the TDOA ones there is a small white-ish circle around the transmitter-- that's where the robots think he is. A larger circle means a higher degree of uncertainty.
And that's the very basics of what I'm doing for my thesis. So, the simulator is essentially done, now I just have to make it work on the hardware robots.