Goose Chasing Robot

shoemakerlevy9 · 2017-04-12T19:33:24.945Z

Hi,

I have a terrible problem with geese in my yard. I’ve also been a heavy ROS user for the past 2 years now so I thought I’d make a robot to help chase the geese away. I have a prototype up and running, it can visually recognize geese up to 20ft away and will navigate to there location at 0.5m/s. I’d like some help on a few things if anyone is interested.

Things I want:
A better state machine
Autonomous docking
Mobile app support (I think this looks like a good project to work off of https://github.com/mtbii/RobotCA)

The first thing I could use help on is the state machine. If anyone has experience with using ros_smach as is willing to help (or just advise), please email me (nicholas.fragale@gmail.com)

spmaniato · 2017-04-21T04:36:16.446Z

Hey @shoemakerlevy9, cool project

In terms of the state machine, here are some resources that might be of interest:

SMACH tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/action/show/smach/Tutorials
- My fork of their hard-to-find source code: https://github.com/spmaniato/executive_smach_tutorials
FlexBE (Flexible Behavior Engine): flexbe.github.io
- Source code of its core: https://github.com/team-vigir/flexbe_behavior_engine
- GitHub organization (states and GUI app): https://github.com/FlexBE
- FlexBE is an extension of SMACH, but may or may not fit your use case.
- I was somewhat involved in the development of FlexBE, so feel free to ask follow-up questions.
Boost Statechart (C++): http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0/libs/statechart/doc/index.html
- Steep learning curve but much faster and more expressive.