Design and evaluation of a mobile robot kit for undergraduate computer science and computer engineering practicum classes

Abstract

The goal of this project was to design and build a custom mobile robot kit to be used in the new curriculum of Multi-Disciplinary Project (MDP). MDP is an undergraduate project compulsory for Computer Science and Computer Engineering students. The project teams will be provided with a robot kit, which they should assemble and program to perform a specified task. The objective of this FYP is to come up with this demo robot kit.

This project was carried out in two phases. First phase focused on “How can we get a popular robot operating system like ROS to run on an affordable (low cost) custom robot platform? And how feasible would it be”. Phase 2 was more focused on designing and building a customized low-cost platform for MDP.

In phase 1 we were able to use a low cost off-the-shelf robot base platform with an Arduino microcontroller, Raspberry Pi and a sensor module, which was compatible with ROS. First we were able to control the robot through ROS via a laptop. Then we went into replacing the laptop with a $35 credit card size computer called Raspberry Pi. This was never been tried by the industry before. We managed to overcome many difficulties and successfully port ROS over to Raspberry Pi. We got ROS working in a distributed computing setup except for a few minor issues in communication with Raspberry Pi.

In phase 2 we designed and build a robot from scratch. We made use of the knowledge and experience gained from phase 1, as well as the components designed in phase 1 to come up with a demo kit for MDP.

This report provides detailed information on how the hardware and software parts were designed and implemented in this project.