Design of ROS-based Robotic Platform with High-precision stepping motor control

Robot technology rapidly expands from traditional industrial manufacturing to home services, medical care, education, rescue exploration, and military applications. In this paper, we design a Robot Operating System (ROS) based robotic platform with a stepping motor with a high precision advantage. This robotic platform is focused on controlling a stepping motor and combination with sensors such as 2D-Lidar, and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to achieve Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and navigation function. Furthermore, we propose a speed control algorithm for the stepping motor, which can convert the speed command published by Single Board Computer (SBC) into a Pulse-width modulation (PWM) signal. Finally, in the corridor scenario, we tested the robotic platform's 2D-Lidar mapping and autonomous navigation functions. The experimental results show that the robot platform has the good mapping and high-precision autonomous navigation capabilities.