1. Lassie Don't Surf – Making the Aibo Tackle the Hill Update Presentation
Patrick Hart
Justin McHugh
Rachel Pocino
Robotics – Spring 2005

2. The Plan That Was
The Aibo would follow an object (like the pink ball) over rough terrain. Therefore, we would enable the Aibo to walk:
Up an incline (~60°)
Down a decline (~60°)
Up stairs (~8 inches)
Down stairs (~8 inches)

3. The Plan That Was and Why It Isn’t
Using the normal walk, the Aibo won’t go up a 15° slope
He refuses to step onto the incline
He won’t walk up if you put his front paws on the incline
In fact, the best you can get is physically placing him entirely on the slope, and then he’ll walk like crazy - not making any progress, just keeping his place on the incline

4. The Plan That Was and Why It Isn’t
A variety of different walks were tested (some canned and some created)
None of them were any more successful than the Tekkotsu normal walk

5. The Plan That Is
In light of these complications and as suggested during our last presentation, the new plan is obstacle avoidance with stairs and slopes coming later, if time permits
The Aibo will walk towards the horizon
If an obstacle gets in his way, he’ll go around it
Our Aibo will return to his original trajectory

6. Accomplished At the time of writing, the code is entirely planned out
We will be using trigonometry to calculate angles and displacement
The obvious way of calculating displacement would be d = vt, but neither v nor t is quite accurate with the Aibo (e.g. he doesn’t start instantaneously)
So we’ll be using the sensor update as a counter
The scanning code is completed

7. To Accomplish Most of the code has yet to be written
The trigonometry will likely be the most difficult of this
If stairs and slopes are to be done, they need to be planned out

8. Schedule Since our original plan was scrapped, so was the timeline
4/18: trig code completed
4/25: physical avoidance completed
?: anything else

9. Possible Problems with Current Plan
The sensor update is being used as a displacement counter, timer for turning the head, and of course, sensing the IR distances
This may end up being a drain on resources