Designing a low-cost, expressive educational robot

The Trikebot is the result of a ground-up design effort chartered to develop an effective and low-cost educational robot for secondary level education and home use. This paper describes all aspects of the Trikebot, including chassis and mechanism; control electronics; communication architecture; robot control server and student programming environment. Notable innovations include a fast-build construction kit, indoor/outdoor terrainability, CMOS vision-centered sensing, back-EMF motor speed control and a Java programming interface.