Smartphone driven control of robots for education and research

Abstract

Robots are getting increasingly sophisticated and complex and need more simple and intuitive ways for supervision and programming. Simultaneously, smartphones are becoming more innovative, are easier to use and equipped with features and accessories that are capable of offering easier robot control and enhancing user experience. This facilitates a broad range of possibilities for programming, supervision, research, education and training in different robotics domains. Considering restrictions accompanied by entering this new domain, we introduce the smartphone as platform for the control of robots based on a developed controller. Its goal is to be as flexible as possible to meet the given requirements in education and research, and simultaneously offer a easy and intuitive user interface. Flexibility was achieved through modularity and layers of abstraction in the control architecture and hardware design. We've developed both software and hardware prototypes and evaluated them in terms of social acceptance and usability.