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A Robot Architecture for Outdoor Competitions

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Abstract

Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments is a common topic of research, being motivated by robotic competitions and involving several sets of skills. We present a modular architecture to integrate different components for path planning and navigation of an autonomous mobile robot. This architecture was developed in order to participate in the RoboMagellan competition hosted by RoboGames. It is divided in the organizational, functional and executive levels in order to secure that the developed system has programmability, autonomy, adaptability and extensibility. Global and local localization strategies use unscented and extended Kalman filters (UKF and EKF) to fuse data from a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, inertial measurement unit (IMU), odometry and camera. Movement is controlled by a model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) and a proportional controller. To avoid obstacles a deformable virtual zone (DVZ) approach is used. The architecture was tested in simulated environments and with a real robot, providing a very flexible approach to testing different configurations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Brasilia, Brasília, 70910-900, Brazil

    Rodrigo W. S. M. de Oliveira, Ricardo Bauchspiess, Letícia H. S. Porto, Camila G. de Brito, Luis F. C. Figueredo, Geovany A. Borges & Guilherme N. Ramos

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  1. Rodrigo W. S. M. de Oliveira
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  2. Ricardo Bauchspiess
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  3. Letícia H. S. Porto
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  4. Camila G. de Brito
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  5. Luis F. C. Figueredo
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  7. Guilherme N. Ramos
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Correspondence to Rodrigo W. S. M. de Oliveira.

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de Oliveira, R.W.S.M., Bauchspiess, R., Porto, L.H.S. et al. A Robot Architecture for Outdoor Competitions. J Intell Robot Syst 99, 629–646 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-019-01140-9

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