RCUBE: a multipurpose platform for intelligent autonomous system

Since 1995 autonomous, intelligent or mobile robot systems have been investigated and included in the education process. Using commercial and/or open source platforms like LEGO-techniques with the 6.270-Board (Flynn, A.M. and Jones, J.L., 1996), the EyeBot controller (Braunl, Th., 2002) or the PIONEER robots various aspects like mobility, controllability, sensor fusion, line or object recognition, navigation and control strategies were taken into account. The limited abilities of all these systems in computing power or image processing required the development of a new hardware platform called RCUBE (Boersch, I., et al., 2003) combining the features of a typical actuator-sensor-input-output-board with computing power and image recognition capabilities. The system would be suitable as a compact platform for universities, small enterprises and private developers.