MiniRos: an Autonomous UGV Robot for Education and Research

Abstract

MiniRos is a small autonomous UGV-Unmanned ground vehicle developed for education and research purposes. In this paper, we develop MiniRos with a kinematic skid-steering, high torque and compact structure drive system that can take re-search to the outdoor environment. Its small payload capacity and power system are suitable for various types of loads, customized to meet research needs. MiniRos is run on a Robot Operating System (ROS), which has been developed to be compatible with standard robotics programming environments. The robot senses the environment with various kinds of sensors like depth cameras, 2D lidar scanners and performs all processing on embedded computers. The robot can build a 2D map with various SLAM algorithms such as Karto SLAM, Gmapping, Hector SLAM, and navigation in the built map. Moreover, the study evaluated both the computational and the memory requirements based on each SLAM algorithm within different sizes of maps. Finally, skid-steering type robot MiniRos simulation on Gazebo environment is available as open-source, this is a useful tool for researchers and educators.