ROSint - Integration of a mobile robot in ROS architecture

Download or read book ROSint - Integration of a mobile robot in ROS architecture written by André Gonçalves Araújo and published by University of Coimbra. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of this work is to provide hardware abstraction and intuitive operation modes to decrease the development and implementation time of robotic platforms, thus allowing researchers to focus in their main scientific research motivations, e.g., search and rescue, multi-robot surveillance, swarm robotics, among others. To that end, this work presents the development of a compact mobile low-cost robotic platform, denoted as TraxBot, developed and assembled at the Institute of Systems and Robotics (ISR), which has been fully integrated in the well-known Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. Furthermore, several available mobile robots are compared and discussed in terms of their physical dimensions, hardware, sensors, communication abilities, motion, maximum run time and special features. This provides support to the reader on the decision-making acquisition process of a cost-effective robotic platform. Beyond the survey’s results, the robotic system assembly, with a full description of its components as well as detailed information about the microcontroller programming, development and testing are also presented. The potentialities of the TraxBot are described, which combined with the herein presented ROS driver; provide several tools for data analysis and easiness of interaction between multiple robots, sensors and teleoperation devices. In order to validate the approach, several experimental tests were conducted using both real and mixed teams of real and virtual robots.