Real-World Shepherding - Combining Vision, Manipulation, and Planning in RealTime

摘要

Designing real-world applications can involve coordinating many pieces ofhardware and integrating multiple software components. Increased processing power has allowed complex real-world applications to be designed, and there has been increasing interest in the issues involved in designing both the applications and their support. In this paper we describe the issues involved in designing the application. The shepherding application we have chosen is representative of many real-world applications. This report focuses on technical details. We describe the underlying hardware, including the camera, vision processing boards, processors, and puma robot arm. We then discuss the software components we designed to integrate the hardware components in real-time. At each stage we describe the trade-offs between the different possibilities and why the ones chosen were best suited for our environment. We also present results supporting our selection. At appropriate points we indicate underlying support that would have eased and improved our implementation.