Plantbot: A New ROS-based Robot Platform for Fast Building and Developing

TL;DR

Plantbot is a customizable, low-cost ROS-based robot platform designed for rapid development, algorithm testing, and educational purposes, addressing the limitations of existing bulky and expensive robots.

Contribution

This paper introduces Plantbot, a flexible and affordable robot platform that can be easily redesigned and expanded for various research and educational applications.

Findings

Successful SLAM implementation on Plantbot

Effective navigation demonstrated in experiments

Platform's low-cost and modular design verified

Abstract

In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developing rapidly and has been widely used in robotics research because of its flexible, open source, and extensive advantages. In scientific research, the corresponding hardware platform is indispensable for the experiment. In the field of mobile robots, PR2, Turtlebot2, and Fetch are commonly used as research platforms. Although these platforms are fully functional and widely used, they are expensive and bulky. What\u2019s more, these robots are not easily redesigned and expanded according to requirements. To overcome these limitations, we propose Plantbot, an easy-building, low-cost robot platform that can be redesigned and expanded according to requirements. It can be applied to not only fast algorithm verification, but also simple factory inspection and ROS teaching. This article describes this robot platform from several aspects such as hardware design, kinematics, and control methods. At last two experiments, SLAM and Navigation, on the robot platform are performed. The source code of this platform is available.