Autonomous Robotics Platforms

Abstract: Nowadays, it is of crucial importance for the manufacturing industry to be prepared for the application and understanding of autonomous mobile robots. Given this fact, educational institutions have to provide knowledge and experience to students. These autonomous mobile robots are made and controlled using different platforms and programming languages. Currently, the University of Skövde wishes to expand the range of tools to be available for building and experimenting with autonomous robots. For this purpose, this thesis project has two main goals. The first goal is finding the best available robotic platform for small scale, self-built, programmable robots. Such a platform has to include all the hardware necessary for later implementation with the software. The platform is evaluated in this thesis following different criteria. The second goal is to build a robot using the chosen platform. The robot has to perform a certain task taking advantage of its specific hardware. The development of the task has been achieved using the Robot Operative System (ROS). This thesis provides step by step instructions of how to build the platform and perform the task.