Enabling ROS for Low-Cost Educational Robotics Platforms

Robotics has become an increasingly relevant subject for engineering students over the past decade. This subject blends together many topics, such as artificial intelligence, localization, path-planning, machine vision, and human-machine interaction. The need to manage so many different aspects, and by extension, multiple applications, all running simultaneously in the same computing system has given rise to robotics frameworks, which are software packages aimed at providing communications interfaces, standardized messages, and various debugging and simulation tools. The most popular of these robotics frameworks is ROS (Robotics Operating System). The ubiquity of ROS in research and industry motivates that university courses begin introducing ROS in curriculum. To properly teach ROS, some hardware component is required. While educational platforms exists for ROS, such as the famous “Turtlebot”, these platforms tend to be very expensive, creating an expensive cost-to-entry for any course attempting to integrate ROS into their curriculum. To resolve this issue, this paper introduces a software architecture for ROS enabling inexpensive robotics kits, such as the RSLK from Texas Instruments, which are commonly used in university courses.