Design and testing of a mobile robot with three levels of complexity for robotics experimentation

Abstract

A mobile robot (called UV-BOT) was designed at Universidad del Valle for robotics experimentation and can be employed for users with or without any previous knowledge on robotics. UV-BOT is a differential and for indoors-use-only robot; it has sensors for proximity, light detection, localization, and communications, and its speed is controlled by means of two PI controllers, one for each wheel. The robot's firmware was designed by using a real time micro-kernel, known as FreeRTOS, which supports three levels of complexity that have a set of functionalities from the standpoint of perception, mobility, communication, programming, and demos availability. These functionalities are employed by the user interface to program the robot graphically (basic level), using XML (intermediate level) or C (advanced level). At its advanced level, UV-BOT supports behaviororiented programming. Behaviors were used to carry out the performance tests for the mobile robot. As an outcome of these tests, it was found that the localization system of UV-BOT exhibits an average error of 17 cm. Homing (by position and light) and obstacle- avoidance behaviors exhibit average errors of 15 and 17 cm, respectively. In this way, tasks in cooperative robotics can be implemented successfully.