A Mobile Mini-Robot Architecture for Research, Education and Popularization of Science

Abstract

Mobile mini-robots are commonly used for research, education and popularization of science. Often, commercially available minirobots don’t quite fit the characteristics needed for a particular task, and are difficult to adapt since they have proprietary software and hardware. Moreover, they are often quite expensive. In this work we present a relatively low-cost, reconfigurable robot equipped with a wide variety of sensors and enough processing power to allow the on-board execution of intelligent algorithms. We present the complete hardware architecture, and a modularized software architecture that makes full use of hardware interruptions and software processes to have a perfectly timed control of the robot. All these characteristics make the new mobile mini robot ExaBot a very malleable, multi task mini-robot.