MILO - Mobile Intelligent Linux Robot Alok Rao, Satish Kumar, Amit Renu & Prof. G. C. Nandi Email: [email protected] Indian Institute of Information Technology, Deoghat, Jhalwa, Allahabad - 211 012

(HCI) of a mobile robot which incorporates characteristics of the human behavior. The paper presents the design of a low cost prototype initially and the goes on to describe the controller OS, robot vision, AI, navigation strategy, distributed processing, HCI and concludes with the areas of application of such a design.

Abstract This paper describes the architecture of a low cost autonomous/guided mobile robot. This robot is being developed at Indian Institute of Information Technology (Allahabad, India) as a part of a research for the use of mobile robots in day-to-day life. The project is named MILO (Mobile Intelligent Linux rObot). The robot has been designed from commercial off the shelf components, thus reducing the prototype design time. The robot incorporates stereoscopic vision for long range obstacle detection and infrared proximity sensor for short range obstacle detection. The stereoscopic vision for obstacle detection utilizes laser targeting to achieve optimization in determining distances at a much lower cost than the commercially available range scanners. The robot also has a HCI (Human Computer Interface) via a multimedia interface. The control software of the robot is capable of taking voice commands from a user who has the master rights to robot. It utilizes probabilistic reasoning approach. The entire software and control firmware of the robot has been designed with an embedded approach in open-source Linux which makes it easily portable over different hardware architectures. In the firmware the kernel of Linux used was 2.6.8-1.358. Control of the robot using the video feed from the on board cameras has been achieved.

2. Hardware Prototype The hardware prototype has been constructed from COTS (Commercially off the shelf) components. The robot is a 4 wheeled, each wheel being independently powered by a dc servo motor. The wheels are standard pneumatic 6” diameter deep treaded for a variety of terrains. The base is a 3mm PVC board which provides ample rigid ness to the structure. The robot is powered by a redundant battery pack custom designed and flexible. The each Battery pack consists of 12 1.5V AA size NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) cells. Each pack provides 2200mAh units of charge. Five such packs are used in a redundant arrangement. Three packs are used to power the robot and the remaining 2 are backups to be used once the voltage from the other three falls below a set threshold. A high speed switching circuit switches the battery packs to the unused ones the moment the voltage drops below the threshold level. The onboard computer gets its power from the battery subsystem through a regulated DC circuit designed to keep the voltage between 12-12.5V. The power block

1. Introduction To most people, mobile robots are recognizable as machines that only have applications in industry and research. They fail to realize that these robots can be a part of our daily life. An example would be an autonomous intelligent vacuum cleaner which can learn about its surroundings and do its job without fail. Robot guides for museum, robot lawn mowers etc. would be a technology which will be available soon. The biggest challenge would be to make them available at an affordable cost. Our paper describes a hardware/software architectural framework that significantly reduces the cost of such personal robots. It also discusses those aspects of robotics which involve the Human Computer Interface

Fig. 1 MILO robot

as the battery system has been named powers the motors, the controller circuit and the entire on board computer. The robot takes the sensory inputs from the onboard sonar array, stereoscopic vision, infra-red

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proximity sensors, Fresnel-diode based temperature sensor and touch sensors. The sonar array consists of 12 sonar sensors arranged in the following fashion. There are two sensors in the front and rear angled towards ground at an angle of 45 degrees to sense the irregularities in the ground. The sonar range scanners used have been designed using ceramic based piezo 40 MHz ultrasonic transducers. The sonar array that has been designed reduces price up to 2 times as compared to the commercial ones. The Fresnel lens infra-red diode sensor is a temperature sensor that has been calibrated to measure the temperature of human beings. The sensor would give the presence of humans around the robot or objects showing same temperature as humans. The robot vision comprises of a low cost stereoscopic camera setup. The cameras are the standard USB CMOS cameras. They have been enclosed in a specially designed cabinet with a custom designed zoom lens. The infrared proximity sensors are backup sensors which are redundant. The onboard computer is a low cost alternative to the PC/104 embedded boards. The board used here is an ITX board. It has VIA C3 CPU clocked at 800 MHz. This board provides a float point performance equivalent to that of a Pentium 3 clocked at 400 MHz. It has 512Mb SDRAM which is sufficient for running the Operating system. The board is very economical on cost and power consumption, costing around 130 US$ and consuming 20W at peak performance. A servo controller board provides control of the pan-tilt of the stereoscopic camera.

3. Controller Operating System The on board operating system is a customized Linux distribution. The details of customization of a Linux distribution can be found in [6]. The operating system uses the Linux kernel 2.6.5 at its core. The Linux 2.6 series of kernel was chosen because it inherently provides the soft real-time capabilities. The control software that controls the movement of the robot is thus to a great extent predictable. The hard real-time scheduling is under development at the time the paper was written. The hard real-time capability is added as kernel module by modifying the interrupt handler and the scheduler. The modifications have been made as a patch in the Linux kernel source. The OS also has the necessary drivers to operate the vision system and the wireless subsystem. The distribution contains all the necessary system software needed for operating the robot. The software comprises of a client server model based robot interfacing package implementation details of which were referred from [8]. The robot collects sonar data and

draws a map of its immediate nearby surroundings and uses it to devise the strategy for navigating to its goal position. Since the processing of the path to the goal position is highly computational the processing is offloaded onto a Linux cluster of 4 nodes via the wireless Ethernet network. The image processing for stereoscopic depth calculation can be done on board the robot due to the highly optimized approach used. Once the wireless network of the robot goes out of range, it connects the internet using a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) modem that connects to the internet and contacts a server running on a static IP. In our case it is 210.212.48.11. There is a server running on this IP to which the client software of the robot connects and transmit data. This increases the range of the robot to areas beyond the reach of the wireless Ethernet network. The robot is able to transfer imagery data and control data over the internet. This provides a MILO Architecture

Navigation Algorithm

Communication software

Vision Software

Host end software

Robot Specific API

Linux OS Abstraction

Hardware

Fig.2 Architecture diagram of MILO

low cost solution for the connectivity of the robot and the user. Since the bandwidth available is in the region of 128Kbps, live video feed can be sent from the stereoscopic cameras at around 15 frames / sec The onboard operating system also has the capability to capture audio from the surroundings and transmit over the communication sub system. As shown in fig.2 the architecture of MILO is a layered architecture which makes the task of designing the system simple. The hardware which mainly comprises of off-the-shelf components runs customized version of the Linux operating system. The Robot specific APIs which have been coded by us comprise of a set of drivers and daemon programs for controlling the robot. The daemon programs listen on the local interface 127.0.0.1. The protocol of communication for the user with the robot is via another client-server program that requires authentication from the robot’s client end software.

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Software Architecture Host End Software Client for telemetry data and streamed video from Robot's Vision sub-system

Robot End Software Navigation Algorithm based on Markov Localization Theory

Communication Server for Wireless Ethernet and CDMA mobile phone

Vision Software for depth calculation and video surveillance and pan-tilt functions

Robot Specific API Motor Control Functions Sonar/Sensor data acquisition

Fig.3 Software Architecture of MILO Robot.

This approach is added as a security measure so that even if the protocol of the robot’s command is made public, no other client can hijack the robot. The message passing between the client and the server of the robot and the host end software is encrypted using the OpenSSL (Open Secured Socket Library) available with the Linux distribution of Fedora Core 2. All motion commands and sensory information is encrypted and transmitted in the above mentioned manner. However the video data from the web cameras are not encrypted due to the low bandwidth available while communicating the GSM mobile phone. The Fig.3 shows the software Architecture for MILO. The robot specific API comprises of a set of system calls, which govern the motor control functions via the H-bridge controller. The motors are globally available to all programs are device files viz. /dev/motor1, /dev/motor2, /dev/motor3 and /dev/motor4. A driver is written for the Linux 2.6 kernel which controls the motor devices. The details of the kernel module can be found in [7]. The device files of the motors can be opened just as any other file in Linux and a value between -127 to 128 is written to it using the write system call. A value 0 indicates a halt i.e. brake. The negative value represents the anti-clockwise rotation of the wheels, while the magnitude of the value represents the speed. The OS communicates the value to the device /dev/mcontroller1 which is a kernel module written for the 8-bit microcontroller that controller that controls the PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) for controlling the speed of the motors. The host end software is the client software used for manually controlling the robot using a joystick. The host-end software transmits the joystick commands to the robot via the wireless Ethernet or the network connection established via the mobile phone. The host-end software comprises of a set of backend clients and a front-end GUI

(Graphical User Interface). We have followed this approach to separate out the development of GUI and the client programs. This way any change in the GUI can be made without having to make any changes in the client software. This makes the host-end software highly modular. The GUI displays the image coming form the cameras on board the robot and the data acquired by the sensors in a tabular form.

4. Stereoscopic Vision The stereoscopic vision system used in the project MILO incorporates certain conventional features available in the general stereoscopic systems along with some unique ones developed by us. The camera has a 20x zoom lens system controlled by a motor. The lens subsystem is mounted with a laser torch which is used by the robot to mark out objects. Normally object detection in stereoscopic vision is a bit different than what is implemented here. The basic idea of object detection is choosing an object in one image (say left) and searching that particular object in other (right) image. Here this procedure has been made easy and efficient by targeting the object in the way by laser which in turn can be easily identified in the images. After processing the images we get the coordinates of that particular object with reference to the baseline-axis as shown in Fig.5 and then we have the triangle and the various attributes related to it, which will give the object depth. The first step after capturing the images is to identify the object whose distance is to be calculated. For this a source of laser light is fixed in between the two cameras in the hardware setup and the object in the 3D world co-ordinate is targeted using the laser light. Servo motors are connected to the camera stand in order to target the object by changing the camera position by pan and tilt functions. Once the object is targeted the camera captures the images in JPEG format. These images are

Fig.4. Image taken by the left camera. The laser can be seen on the chair back.

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then scanned for the laser point. Various algorithms and the properties of laser point have been used to identify the object .For example the features such as intensity, radius of the laser spot and HSV (Hue Saturation Value) are simultaneously used for breaking tie between numbers of contender points. Above mentioned attributes of the laser spot were used to build up a weight matrix which is then used to identify the laser point. The weight matrix is masked with the original images for the identification purpose. The weight matrix formation uses the noise reduction technique and also uses the concept of recurrent network to converge at the identified shape of the laser point.

separate image views of an object of interest (e.g. the laser targeted object). The distance between the centers of the two lenses is called the baseline. The objective is to find the coordinates (X, Y, and Z) of a point W given its image points (x1, y1) and (x2, y2).It has been assumed that the cameras are identical and the co-ordinate systems of both cameras are perfectly aligned, differing only in the location of their origins (a condition usually met in practice). If the above conditions are met then the distance can be calculated using the following formula: Z = f - (f * b)/(x2-x1) (1) Where F is the focal length of the camera. b is the baseline x1 & x2 are the co-ordinate points

Fig.5 The points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) are the position of the laser points in the two images. Fig.7. Laser Point identified in the left image.

Fig.6. Image taken by the right camera. The laser spot can be seen on the chair. Mapping a 3-d scene onto an image plane is a many to one transformation. That is an image point does not uniquely determine the location of a corresponding world point. Here it is shown that the missing depth information can be obtained by the following stereoscopic imaging technique details of which can be found in [5]. Stereo imaging in this case involves obtaining two

Fig.8 Laser Point identified in the right image. The localization of the point of the laser to the right region of the left image (Fig4) and to the left of the right image (Fig6) allows us to discard each unprocessed half of the image viz. the left half of the left image and right half of the right image. This

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approach optimizes the entire process of identifying the point by 50% since almost more than half of both the images are not processed. The camera setup is not very accurate in its construction so the camera setup is calibrated for known distances at known focal lengths of the lenses to compute the errors. The errors occurring at different distances at known focal lengths are collected in a database and are stored in the robot’s on board computer. These error estimates are then utilized as a training data for the neural network used in the software. Collected values for distances are further compared with the desired output values and based on perceptron learning rule the error is minimized.

5. Human Computer Interface The human computer interface is another unique feature in the robot MILO. It can communicate with humans in a way which makes humans comfortable to interact with the robot. The HCI of the robot mainly comprises of two modules – • The audio output with the computer voice subsystem implemented using Linux “festival” program. When the robot is being used as an AGV it uses the preset messages as an input to the speaker module. e.g. if the robot is behind a person it uses the fresnel lens diode to detect the objects for human beings by taking the temperature into consideration. Once a human is detected it politely asks the person to move over and allow the robot to pass. • An audio input system is also implemented for voice recognition. This is used to command a robot using voice. This is an essential implementation for making the humans be comfortable communicating with the robot. At the time when this paper is being written this module takes commands as phrases in English language. It uses Mel Cepstrum coefficients are used as the features for the classification of the voice of the commander or the master of the robot from another person’s voice trying to command the robot. There are two phases involved: 1. In the training phase, the voice of the user is recorded and the feature is extracted .The features extracted are then compressed and stored in the database. 2. In the testing phase, the voice of the user is again recorded and the features are extracted again. If the difference between feature extracted now and one of the feature is below certain threshold, then the user is allowed to command the robot. The algorithm used for clustering the features is LBG (Linde-Buzo-Gray) also known as k-means. The LBG minimizes the distortion error of the

discrete representation. In signal processing this error measures the fidelity of the data encoding (the original use of vector quantization was in data compression).

6. Conclusions The prototype of the MILO robot is complete. We have successfully tested the prototype with the manual control and the video broadcast from the on board cameras are able to transmit the view from the robot and we were also able to transmit the image and the sensor data via the mobile phone. The robot was also controlled using the mobile phone as the connection medium to the host computer. The on board Linux distribution was seamlessly integrated with the MINIITX board. Now any new application or an update can be easily added to the existing distribution. The robot is able to play audio files in wav or ogg format using a third party player.

7. Future work and Scope The proposed project initially aimed at developing a low cost mobile robot platform. The design of the navigation algorithm utilizes Markov Localization approach ([1]), but the algorithm has not been implemented yet. The autonomous navigation algorithm’s design takes into consideration the navigation in dynamic environments, is still being explored and will be incorporated in the future revisions of the paper.

Acknowledgements We are thankful to our director Dr. M. D. Tiwari, Director IIIT-A, for his encouragement. We acknowledge the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India for sponsoring the project under the project number – IIITA/MHRD/F-273/2002. T.S.V. We are also thankful to all our colleagues who have helped us out in different ways.

. REFERENCES [1] Howard, R. A. 1960. Dynamic Programming and Markov Processes.MIT Press andWiley. [2] J. Aloimonos, I. Weiss, and A. Bandyopadhyay, Active vision, in Proceedings of the 1st InternationalConference on Computer Vision, London, 1987, pp. 35-54. [3] D. Coombs, I. Horswill and P. von Kaenel, Disparity filtering: Proximity detection and segmentation, in Proc. SPIE Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XI: Algorithms,

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Techniques, and Active Vision, Boston, Nov. 1992, pp. 195-206. [4] Ian D. Horswill and Rodney A. Brooks, Situated vision in a dynamic world: Chasing objects, in Proc. AAAI 88, St. Paul, 1988, pp. 796-800. [5] .S. Fu, R.C. Gonzalez, C.S.G. Lee, “Robotics control, sensing, Vision, and Intelligence International Edition 1987”, pp. 296-447. [6] Craig Hollabaugh, “Embedded Linux, Hardware, Software and Interfacing Indian Edition”, pp. 13-401, 2003 [7] Peter Jay Salzman, Michael Burian, Ori Pomerantz. The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide. http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/lkmpg.html. [8] Internetworking With TCP/IP Volume II: Design, Implementation, and Internals (with D. Stevens), Third ed, 1999. ISBN 0-13-973843-6.

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MILO - Mobile Intelligent Linux Robot

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Deoghat, Jhalwa, Allahabad - 211 012. Abstract .... the wireless network of the robot goes out of range, it connects the ...

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