Towards Open Architectures for Mobile Robots: ZeeRO

We report on ongoing research regarding the development of open mobile robot architectures. Preliminary results of our work show that a great degree of modularity and complexity in mobile robot design can be achieved, by simply using off-the-shelf available hardware components. A hardware robotic platform would not be nearly as efficient, if it wouldn't be sustained by an adequate software system. We are proposing the use and the development of the player/stage software project, of which we are active contributors, as the backbone of our software robotic platform. This paper presents the experimental results regarding the development of the ZeeRO mobile robot, with an emphasis on its hardware and software architecture. We give insight on the structure of the main modules (navigation, sensing, processing), as well as the robot's interface with the Player server. Several tests with virtual environment navigation algorithms by means of simulation tools (Stage, Gazebo) have also been conducted. A small section of the paper is dedicated to Javaclient, a player/stage client for the Java programming language, initially developed at the University of Southern California, and later moved to SourceForge