Mobile Robot Algorithms Laboratory

The ultimate goal of the Laboratory is to realize the Human's long-standing dream of having a fully autonomous mobile assistant who can perform assignments and make decisions on its own to achieve the goal.

Main research projects

Duckietown is an open research project in autonomous robotics domain. It consists of two parts -- robots (“duckiebots”) and town ("duckietown") where these robots roam. A life like traffic environment including traffic lights, signs, roads with markup, and some obstacles are simulated through the town. Each mobile robot is built on an autonomous chassis and works using a Raspberry Pi computer with ROS. All the software is autonomous. A simple RGB-camera is used for receiving data from the environment.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods are essential for mobile robots which are subjected to and required to effectively act in unknown environments. In spite of the various algorithms which have already been proposed, an algorithm that robustly solves the problem in a general case and satisfies performance constraints is still a subject of research. Unfortunately, there is no publicly available framework that provides a common set of components in order to speed up SLAM research (frameworks and toolkits that simplify development of particular SLAM parts are not taken into account).

Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) have made the distribution of knowledge accessible and borderless across the world. We wish to harness their power and bring the opportunity to learn effectively to all people regardless of their background. We are developing online courses to teach key software engineering technologies and improving the ease of development of online courses for Stepik.org teachers. We hope to support the future of education with our research into the development of automatic generators for online course tasks which will help make it easier to generate tasks for the courses using these platforms.