Desarrollo de un robot móvil compacto integrado en el middleware ROS

摘要

This paper presents the TraxBot robot and its full integration in the Robotic Operating System (ROS). The TraxBot is a compact mobile robotic platform developed and assembled at the Institute of Systems and Robots (ISR) Coimbra. The goal in this work is to drastically decrease the development time, providing hardware abstraction and intuitive operation modes, allowing researchers to focus in their main research motivations, e.g., search and rescue, multi-robot surveillance or swarm robotics. The potentialities of the TraxBot are described which, combined with the ROS driver developed, provide several tools for data analysis and easiness of interaction between multiple robots, sensors and tele-operation devices. To validate the approach, diverse experimental tests using real and virtual simulated robots were conducted.