Open Source Robotics Platform for Educational Purposes

The paper presents a development of a platform for open-source robotics with the aim to introduce the topic to wider audience in a simpler and application-oriented manner. The platform consists of hardware designs, based on popular community projects, application software designed with modularity in mind. The design isn’t tied specifically to any type of robot, rather it is encouraged to be ported on different robot types and to introduce the concept long used in the personal computers – the user is presented with the hardware to assemble the configuration and install software necessary for the chosen application. What separates this approach from the already developed solutions is the emphasis on simplicity and robustness, using a number of techniques, such as minimum dependencies, maximum usage of the chosen software libraries and simplified hardware design. Nonetheless expandability to a full blown system with computer vision, artificial intelligence and internet-of-things is still possible, due to the simplicity and modularity.