What is COMRADE ?

COMRADE is a robotics research project being undertaken by a group of engineering students of PESIT, Bangalore. It is being funded by Yahoo! Inc. , and Encore Software Ltd..

COMRADE stands for Co- Operative Mobile Robots for Autonomous Decisive Exploration. The project involves construction of networked autonomous mobile robots equipped with sensors, gripper and onboard computers. Cooperation is achieved through distributed task resolution. Each robot possesses a highly layered architecture, each layer being capable of interaction at various levels of granularity.

(Video 1, AVI format) Adam locking on to a ribbon lying on the ground using its IRIS machine vision engine

(Video 2, AVI format) sonar based abstacle avoidance drills

(Video 3, AVI format) Adam performing image based line following

(Video 4, AVI format) Adam missing a line, later following it

Goals

The goal of the project is to set up a functional platform for implementation and testing of the following capabilities:

• distributed actuator network with automatic feature monitoring and "hot plug" capabilities
• seamless query based interaction between various layers
• creation of a unified perception layer which integrates information from various sensors
• behavioral model involving feature-based priority resolution of tasks to be performed
• machine vision engine with the following capabilities (IRIS)
  
  
  • basic 2D image processing with semi-automatic camera calibration
  • stereoscopic vision
  • 3D map reconstruction
  • object detection based on shape matching
  • multiple target tracking using optical flow estimation
  • offline space carving
  
  
• obstacle avoidance, predictive path planning
• robust localisation by integration of sonar, image and odometric data

More detailed information on IRIS, the machine vision system of COMRADE is available on it's own subsite .

Find out more about the project by clicking on the links to the left. You can also check out our journal, where we post about the latest developments on the project. Mail us at mail@project- comrade.org with your comments and suggestions.