Analysis and Design of a Two-Wheeled Robot With Multiple User Interface Inputs and Vision Feedback Control

Abstract

Environments for robotics research and education are usually based on open source code or use proprietary software tools. Open source usually requires a user to know a low level programming language and proprietary software does not provide the environment needed for research and educational activities. In addition to the software, the hardware must be inexpensively and easily fabricated and assembled for teaching and experimentation purposes. In this manuscript, we will present the design and fabrication of a small size two-wheel mobile robotic platform developed for research and education purposes. Subsequently, the software environment for controlling the robot which is based on LabVIEW will be presented. LabVIEW was chosen because it provides many built-in toolboxes, and it is characterized by expandability and ease of interface with external devices. The software allows experienced as well as novice users to develop control code with ease. The robot communicates with control software in LabVIEW through a Bluetooth device. The developed environment is used to control the robot through multiple interfaces, to implement obstacle avoidance algorithms with ease, to implement open and closed loop control algorithms, to easily incorporate and use an inexpensive web camera for vision calibration, and is currently used to implement image processing and voice processing algorithms for robot localization and control both for research and education in both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Adding obstacle avoidance to a robotic platform for human robot interaction

“…A Bluetooth communication device bridges the unidirectional interface from the commanding computer to the robot. The overall cost of the robotic device is approximately $100 US [1,2].…”

“…In addition to the user interface modalities, other educational features include the ability to define control gains, time to perform a particular motion and the path planning algorithm without any obstacles in the workspace. The details of the development of the existing platform and its features will not be repeated here but the interested reader could get more information in [1,2].…”