ROS, Android and cloud robotics: How to make a powerful low cost robot

Abstract

With the constant development in the robotics field, many solutions require a high hardware complexity to be executed resulting in an expensive robotic system. Furthermore, these solutions are usually closed box implementations that are hard to be reproduced. Hence, this project proposes a system structure to reduce these difficulties in robotics development. This system consists of a low cost robot with an embedded Android phone in a ROS environment. For testing this implementation, two Android phones, a laptop and a robot with an Arduino microcontroller have been used. The results of the study demonstrated several advantages of using this system, such as incorporating processing and sensing from the smartphone on the robot, having external heavy processing in a Server outside the robot and being able to connect the robot to the cloud. Therefore, using a popular Android device running a Rosjava application can be very useful in robotics applications and development, mainly due to the possibilities provided by this simple system.