Connecting ARIA with Pioneer Robot

Today was the first time I managed to connect and run ARIA using the Pioneer robot, not the simulation.

I mounted the SICK Laser scanner using adhesive and connected its serial to the BOX (I will add the correct name later). Then connected the robot's serial to the serial of the BOX.

BOX description:

port 1 - still waiting for the Arm

port 2 - still waiting for the LRU

port 3 - Robot

port 4 - Laser

Then installed the windows drivers for the BOX and saw that it maps the ports to COM13-17

After spending 2 hours the previous day, trying to figure out why ARIA can't connect to the robot, even thought i was specifying the ports ( -rp COM17) when running the .java

Rolf discovered the problem. Windows is not happy when the port number is greater than 9.

So today I went into the Device Manager -> Advanced and choose ports 1,2,3,4. Some were showing In USE, but do not worry just choose and confirm.

First found the Robot and then the laser, there is a soft restart for the laser each time ARIA connects to it, so waiting for 10-15 sec.

I was able to log the laser reading using ArLasserLogger() - it takes the robot instance, filename, start_angle, end_angle, see Docs for more explanation.

I was not able to get the robot to wander, not relying on the sonar sensors, but I got it working on the Aria Simulator and I want to try if the recorder map can be read by MobilEyes.

For now I am using my 6 years ACER Laptop running Windows XP, SP3, the battery is bad and It heats up a lot. I am looking forward to the new laptops as well as for 2D Robotic Arm and LRU.