Navigation is critical for mobile robot applications, such as maximum-space-coverage home cleaning, goods delivery for logistics robots in warehouse and hospital, to name a few applications only. Challenges in navigation include 3D map import or construction (e.g., SLAM), path planning, and collision avoidance. In this webinar, which is divided into two sections, we demonstrate how to develop and simulate a collision avoidance algorithm with the CAD model of an Adept mobile robot (Pioneer 3-DX) in Simulink. After you verify that the algorithm works on desktop simulation, you can seamlessly test the algorithm on the real robot by using the same Simulink model without reimplementing the algorithm.

Simulation of different robot algorithms before manipulating the real hardware enables robotics researchers to focus more on algorithms development and worry less about hardware debugging. Meanwhile, it also makes robotics teaching more affordable. Every student doesn’t need access to an expensive robot to learn various concepts of robotics technology. Sometimes it might be that the department is on a budget (apart from student’s budget) and might have only one robot for the entire class.

In Section 1, we demonstrate how to:

• Prepare your CAD model so that it can be imported into SimMechanics.
• Import the CAD model.
• Add actuations to joints.
• Add motion constraints to joints.

In Section 2, we demonstrate how to:

• Create a 3D environment.
• Simulate virtual sensors in Simulink.
• Design and simulate a collision avoidance algorithms using Stateflow.
• Test the algorithms on a real robot.

About the Presenter: Swarooph Seshadri is an Application Support Engineer with Mathworks. His interests are in physical modeling of dynamic systems and designing control systems for them. Swarooph holds an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station.