Design and Development of a ROS Enabled CAN Based All-Terrain Vehicle Platform

Abstract

The widespread use and adoption of the Robot Operating System (ROS) has led to the rapid acceleration of robotic technology and algorithm development as it relates to robotics. The modularity and scalability of ROS enables researches to focus on the specific method rather than getting tangled up in the low level abstraction of coding a motor to run. With this in mind, the authors have taken an existing Controller Area Network (CAN) based, Radio Frequency (RF) controlled All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) and converted the various existing system to a ROS based platform that can easily add or subtract sensors as need be. To aid in the rapid deployment of this concept, National Instrument (NI) hardware and their companion LabVIEW software (with the ROS for LabVIEW toolkit) was utilized. Between ROS and LabVIEW the ATV was upgraded to be ROS enabled and still work with the existing CAN based systems. The process of this conversion is detailed in this paper.