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arXiv · 1705.07231

Adapting Low-Cost Platforms for Robotics Research

Thommen George Karimpanal·Mohammadreza Chamanbaz·Wenzheng Li·Timothy Jeruzalski·Abhishek Gupta·Erik Wilhelm
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Abstract

Validation of robotics theory on real-world hardware platforms is important to prove the practical feasibility of algorithms. This paper discusses some of the lessons learned while adapting the EvoBot, a low-cost robotics platform that we designed and prototyped, for research in diverse areas in robotics. The EvoBot platform was designed to be a low cost, open source, general purpose robotics platform intended to enable testing and validation of algorithms from a wide variety of sub-fields of robotics. Throughout the paper, we outline and discuss some common failures, practical limitations and inconsistencies between theory and practice that one may encounter while adapting such low-cost platforms for robotics research. We demonstrate these aspects through four representative common robotics tasks- localization, real-time control, swarm consensus and path planning applications, performed using the EvoBots. We also propose some potential solutions to the encountered problems and try to generalize them.

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Thommen George Karimpanal, Mohammadreza Chamanbaz, Wenzheng Li, Timothy Jeruzalski, Abhishek Gupta, Erik Wilhelm. 2017-05-20. Adapting Low-Cost Platforms for Robotics Research. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07231

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