Development of a task achievement evaluation system for robot car control teaching materials using a laser range sensor

It has been revealed that 33.9% of junior high schools in Japan handle robot car control materials in their classes in the content Information Technology" "Solving problems by programming measurement and control" in the technical field of the Junior High School Courses of Study announced in 2009. In order to evaluate the degree of achievement in terms of social requirements, safety, environmental impact, and economic efficiency, it is important to quantitatively evaluate the motion of the robot car in the classes using robot car control materials. In this paper, we aim to develop a system to quantitatively evaluate the motion of a robot car using a laser range sensor. The laser range sensor has the characteristic of being able to measure a wide area on a flat surface with high accuracy. The measurement method to be developed first obtains measurement data of only the background without the robot car, and then obtains measurement data including the movement of the robot car, and transforms the measurement data of the two states into coordinate data on the xy coordinate plane. Only the necessary data is extracted from the transformed coordinate data by using the background subtraction method. Here, in the background subtraction method, only the coordinate data where the robot car exists is extracted by discriminating the difference between the distance data of the two states by a threshold value. Then, the center point of the robot car is calculated by referring to the extracted coordinate data and the dimension information of the robot car. We measure the robot car by acquiring the coordinate data of the calculated center point at each scanning time of the sensor. As a result of the experiment, we were able to measure the motion of the robot car in a linear motion on the xy coordinate plane with the y-axis direction as the front.