I worked on autonomously driving the Grow-out House Robot (GohBot) with Colin Usher in FPTD at Georgia Tech Research Institute.

I worked on localizing the GohBot using an indoor ultrasonic GPS, detecting obstacles using depth data from Microsoft Kinect and designing path planning and obstacle avoidance routines. This video shows the robot driving autonomously while avoiding chickens.

Testing algorithms in real poultry house environment.

I wrote a “Nudging” routine, where a bird in front of the robot will be bumped slightly, in order to move it out of the way. A “Drive around” routine was written to recalculate the robots path in case the bird doesn’t move, or if a static obstacle is encountered. Weekly tests were conducted in a grow-out house with broiler-breeder chickens.

Publication:
[1]   C. T Usher, W. D Daley, B. P Joffe and A. Muni. Robotics for Poultry House Management. ASABE Annual International Meeting, 2017.