Sam Khalandovsky

At MIT Lincoln Lab, I worked on developing autonomous driving capability for the Packbot. Using a scanning LIDAR sensor mounted to the Packbot's base as the primary sensor, I was able to perform SLAM to generate maps and use them for motion-planning while avoiding obstacles.

The Packbot used two onboard computers; one was in charge of low-level functions such as motor and arm control, while the other ran and performed high-level tasks such as motion planning. A ROS node I wrote took care of two-way communication between the two computers. The navigator computer also took input over Bluetooth from a gamepad, and communicated with an external controller laptop over WiFi.

While working on this project I had a chance to give a short talk and demo of the Packbot to a group of students from MIT's MITES program, which was also fun.