Mobile Robot equipped with Laser Pointer for Planning and Intentions

Abstract: The demands of mobile robots system are growing rapidly in recent days. Autonomous and semi-autonomous mobile robots for indoor environments have become great helper to human, such as transport robot in warehouse, cleaning robot for apartment and various humanoids for personal assistance, education and space exploration. This thesis project work describes how to implement a mobile robot system for unstructured indoor environment. This mobile robot system is able to build a map of the environment, plan path and navigate robot between user-defined locations in the environment autonomously or teleoperated by human through GUI or keyboard on a remote control terminal. Additionally, this mobile robot will be equipped a laser pointer worked as an interaction interface between robot and human by showing robot intensions to operator or surroundings. The development of this project work will involve two rapid growing features, one is depth camera and the other is ROS. Use depth camera as the primary sensor has been accepted by more and more mobile robot platform. ROS, as the fast-growing robot software framework, is an inevitable path when developing robot systems.