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Ardabot

The Project

Ardabot is an open source autonomous vehicle controller written in Java created to work in the simulated environment USARSim. USARSim also aimed to provide robot developers with basic sensor, visualization, mapping features that sits on top of the popular game Unreal Tournament 2004 physical engine.

Ardabot project started as an assignment for Autonomous Robots class.

Ardabot is mainly written to work in DM-ARDA map which is a facsimile of the DARPA Urban Challange environment. We installed (soft-install, through a config file) a Tarantula 3D laser scanner which supplied us 3D range data. We then applied vertical scanline detection algorithm to define landmarks which in turn were used to map the environment. Then, using this map, the bot was able to navigate its environment.

Ardabot features include a Driver UI which also lets the user drive manually, and lets user observe vertical scanline algorithm at work, real-time. User can toggle scanline visualization on and off using the c key. For manual driving, the keys are e for forward, x for stop, f for right steering and a for left steering.

In Auto-Drive mode, Ardabot will take over control of the vehicle and start identifying navigatable locations. These targets will be shown in MapUI visually in green.

Configuration

In order to install Ardabot, you must have Unreal Tournament 2004, USARSim and DM-ARDA map installed. See this documentation for more details. Then, in UT2004\System\USARBot.ini file, you make following changes:

[USARBot.RangeScanner3D]
MaxRange=1000.000000
ScanInterval=0.4
VerticalFOV=0.4363
VerticalResolution=0.0145
HorizontalFOV=1.0472
HorizontalResolution=0.0209
...
...
[USARBot.P2AT]
...
Sensors=(ItemClass=class'USARBot.RangeScanner3D',ItemName="TarantulaRangeScanner3D",
Position=(X=0.14399984,Y=0.0,Z=-0.0919999),Direction=(Y=0.1,Z=0.0,X=0.0))

Then, through Ant, you can fire up the UI using ant gui that will automatically connect to localhost port 3000. It is recommended you develop with UT/USARSim in server mode as seen below because gaming mode with full blown view (even when minimized) would eat up too much of your CPU processing power.

ucc server DM-Arda_250?game=USARBot.USARDeathMatch?imeLimit=0?GameStats=False
-ini=USARSim.ini -log=usar_server.log

Downloads

USARSim files including maps

Source Code (Sourceforge)

Ardabot Paper

Javadoc

Music Video

Video 1

Video 2

Help

For any questions, comments, I am available at ardabotbilgidata.com. Any suggestions, additional features, patches, bug reports can also be communicated through this address. Based on the feedback, I might also start a FAQ that will also be published here.

Have fun,

Burak Bayramlı

Bhosphorus University