agarie/vector-field-histogram

A C implementation of the Vector Field Histogram algorithm for local path planning.

Hey!

I'm a Software Engineer initially trained in Electrical Engineering and Control Systems.

• I currently work at Tarmac, a software consultancy from Minneapolis, US, as a Senior Software Engineer. I deal mainly with Rails and React.
• 🔭 Up until 2022 I worked at Mercúrio, a company I co-founded in Brazil that specializes in digital repositories and digitization projects for Cultural Heritage Institutions. I wrote most of our internal tools and customized open source repository software—like AtoM, Archivematica, DSpace, Collective Access—to our client's needs.
• 🌱 I’m currently:
  • Studying PostgreSQL internals and optimization strategies 📇
  • Rebuilding my home office and personal workshop 🛠️

---

• ⚡ Fun facts:
  1. I studied Control Engineering at the University of São Paulo but ended up working in software development. Turns out the knowledge I developed there was useful when I designed and built a scanner for large maps while working at Mercúrio.
  2. I spent one year as a Computer Engineering exchange student in Arizona, USA (at ERAU). Due to the lower amount of coursework there compared to Brazil, I spent a lot of time reading and studying about computers, programming and contributing to open source communities. I still have notes written during that time that come in handy.
  3. Most of my early social life started as part of a Pokémon community in Brazil, and I joined the local league as a Tournament Organizer from 2007 up until 2018. I met my wife in one of these tournaments—she ended up becoming a National Champion.
  4. Between 2016 and 2018 I was invited by The Pokémon Company as a Judge for several international tournaments. Thus I can say I visited Australia, Europe and some parts of the US on Pikachu's dime.

vector-field-histogram's Issues

M_PI not defined

make
gcc -Iinclude -Wall -O3 -std=c99 -c src/histogram_grid.c -o histogram_grid.o
src/histogram_grid.c: In function ‘grid_update’:
src/histogram_grid.c:56:64: error: ‘M_PI’ undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean ‘__P’?
int new_x = pos_x + (int) floor(cells * cos(data.direction * M_PI / 180));
^~~~
__P
src/histogram_grid.c:56:64: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in
Makefile:12: recipe for target 'histogram_grid.o' failed
make: *** [histogram_grid.o] Error 1

Implement the VFH+ algorithm

VFH+ is an enhanced version of VFH. It uses some heuristics so there are less parameters to manually adjust.

From my initial reading of the paper, there shouldn't be many difficulties in adapting the code here.

Accept objective_location instead of objective_direction

objective_direction should be calculated by the library using the histogram_grid as a world model.

Use of Malloc

Hi Carlos

Thanks for your work. Easiest to understand implementation of VFH that I have seen. Now to the question. Prior to your changes I had this almost working on a Teensy 3.1 or Due board. Ran into a couple of issues one of which was I was not sure what the output was suppose to look like and second is there a way of not using malloc in the implementation. I am not a C programmer, learning by trial and error here. So I would appreciate any help you could avoid to give me here with an example output and what I could do with malloc.

thanks
Mike

PS. Can't wait to see what you do with VFH+ and VFH*

Document files using Doxygen

First of all, I need to learn how to use Doxygen.

The initialization should consider different referentials

I have to rewrite the math, but it's simple. There should be a referential O for the world map (i.e. the origin of histogram_grid), O' for the origin of the dynamic window (this should be maintained by the library) and O'' for the robot (i.e. the geometric center of the robot).

Return the control signals as a struct

There's a struct in vfh.h that should be used in this case.

Use Check for unit testing

It seems easy to write tests with it and the docs appear to be good. See:

libcheck.github.io/check

Get a DOI from Zenodo

After getting tests and docs ready, it should be as easy as releasing 1.0 and activating the switch on zenodo.org/account/settings/github/.