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Millions of researchers around the world are using run of the mill carts for all of their outdoor data collection needs such as wireless propagation data collection. In response, UBC's Radio Science Lab has proposed Propbot, an autonomous robot that can navigate outdoor routes with ease and reduce the burden of data collectors. Propbot is a ruggedized outdoor robot on which collection equipment can be mounted that will autonomously navigate to points of interest set by a user and collect data at these points. Our team designed a holistic autonomy system for Propbot that uses sensors and intelligent decision making to navigate through unknown environments safely. We used sensors such as GPS, inertial units, lidars, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and estimate the position of the robot in the world. Our system employs well-tested algorithms to compute optimal paths to each point of interest set by the user on our graphical user interface and movements required to avoid new obstacles on this path. In order to test this system, we created a simulated Propbot and a simulation environment of the student union area at UBC with static and dynamic obstacles such as trees, cones, buildings, and pedestrians. Our autonomy system has laid the foundation for Propbot's capabilities, and we hope to see our system helping data collectors in the future!
Keywords: robotics, AMR, mobile robot, autonomy, ROS, package, outdoor robot, waypoint, navigation, SLAM, visual odometry, motion planning, state estimation, open-source, differential drive, UBC, Radio Science Lab