Inexpensive robot for experimental validation of planning and control algorithms

This paper describes the structure of a mobile robot suitable for laboratory experiments. The robot is developed with the ideas of minimizing the production costs and of executing motion commands received from an external computer that runs the (possible computational intensive) planning algorithms. The proposed system is a differential wheeled robot built based on an Arduino platform, it has a small physical size and it is capable of wireless communication. These characteristics make it useful for validating planning algorithms for mobile robots in computer-guided laboratory experiments, while lowering the expenses required by such a setup. Moreover, in order to compensate the communication delay between the central computer and the robot, an estimation algorithm is implemented on the robot for obtaining a smoother motion.