ReMoRo; A mobile robot platform based on distributed I/O modules for research and education

We present our recent work on the electrical and hardware design of the mobile robot platform ReMoRo that is based on distributed input/output modules. We have designed three generation of this platform with different specifications, which it help us to design more compatible and applied mobile robot. Nevertheless, the goal of this project was to develop a low-cost and robust but extensible modular robot platform for research and educational purposes. In this paper we describe a new affordable robot structure that enables large-scale innovative, new curriculum, multi robot research and multi-robotics outreach to computer and artificial intelligent students. We introduce the ReMoRo platform, which offers a balance between capabilities, accessibility, cost and an opendesign. All of electrical devices like sensors module, motor drivers and device communication manager are designed based on ARM Cortex M3 microcontrollers that runs under Real-Time Operating System (freeRTOS) for manages each modules internal scheduling and activation control in communication bus. With a range of different sensors, cylindrical manipulator and omnidirectional locomotion system, RoMeRo can interact with environment in multiple ways, handle common objects and therefore be used in various service robot scenarios like warehouse robots or multi agent mobile robots. We demonstrate the usability of our concept by quantifying the object-handling task and also briefly describe the software design based on ROS framework for educational usage.