Project:ARP

ARP - Autonomous Rover Project

The 4wd mobile platform base for ARP

I know what you'll say. ARP stands for Address Resolution Protocol. Although I agree that reusing acronym is not best practice, on the other hand in this case context should suffice. I don't use the word arp often enough to warrant an other name, which I think it's easy to remember.

The project is about constructing an autonomous rover. It will be most likely be 4WD, packed with a number of sensors and cameras (perhaps kinect).

One of the central ideas about the robot is that it should be able to identify a UK socket and plug and charge itself when the battery requires it. The idea is to build and mount an arm on the rover to be able to do some tasks at different heights, like charging for instance.

The project is open source, as the code gets developed it will be published somewhere.

I think that once you can do these things, you can do so much more. I would like to make the robot play with the dog (or kid one day) and one day interact around the world both physically as well as wifi/bluetooth/upnp, etc.

Revision 0.1

Components

Hardware

Off the shelf 4WD Aluminium platform, easy to start with but will probably have to upgrade as we learn and hit the limits

raspberry pi for running ROScore

Arduino Mega(for low level control)

Arduino motor shield (just because it's easier!)

Kinect

Bespoke manipulation arm (a project in itself)

Software

[ROS] for higher level processing

Arduino firmware, interfacing with ROS

Future developments

For now here we will list all the components I have that could become handy within the rover. The full list will come here as more parts of the project come together.

• 2 mbed LPC1768 http://mbed.org/ and three boards/shields (joystick, usb, eth, etc)
• gprs shield
• radio shields
• various other sensors to be categorized.

Resources

• Ros
• Ros mapping in action
• Arduino
• Reading ultrasound from arduino