Jeeves on a Walkabout

Jeeves has achieved autonomy! Still more work and tuning to be done before he's ready to become a tour guide, but we've reached an important milestone: Jeeves can traverse from one end of the building to the other, with no human intervention apart from telling him where to go.

Toe the Line!!!

A while back (a couple of months ago, actually), a friend of mine built a line-following robot kit with his son. The kit went together fine but didn't work quite right so he asked if I'd take a quick look. I finally got around to it and after some head-scratching, got the little sucker to do its thing:

Getting in the Flow

Fedex delivered a shiny new PX4FLOW sensor today:

I'm hoping that I'll be able to get reliable odometry from a pair of these little babies, thereby solving a very thorny issue. Cross your fingers.

Jeeves' First Map!

Got all of the pieces put together to get the hector_mapping package up-and-running on Jeeves, then took him for a spin around room EB84 (his current parking spot). Here's the generated map. You can't tell from this single static image, but the localization was impressive. This is using no odometry at all, only the laser scanner: