STR Robot: Design of an Autonomous Mobile Robot from Simulation to Reality

Abstract

With the rapid development of simulation tools, the development and validation of autonomous robotic systems have become more efficient before real-world deployment. This paper presents a simulation-to-real implementation of an autonomous mobile robot based on an existing mechanical platform. Instead of focusing on mechanical design, our work concentrates on the development of the onboard control, self-localization, and autonomous navigation system. The proposed robot is equipped with onboard sensing and computation to estimate its pose and navigate autonomously in the environment. The overall framework is first developed and tested in simulation, and then deployed on the real robot for experimental evaluation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and show that simulation provides an effective foundation for developing reliable autonomous mobile robot systems. The source code will be released at https://ntdathp.github.io/outdoor-robot-web.