Implementation of Robot Operating System in Beaglebone Black based Mobile Robot for Obstacle Avoidance Application

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that focus on simplifying the task of creating a complex and advanced robotics system. Its standard framework can be shared with another robotics system that has a similar platform and suitable for being introduced as an educational tool in robotics. However, the problems found out in the current robot platform available in the market are expensive and encapsulated. The development of an open source robot platform is encouraged. Therefore, this research is carried out to design and develop an ROS based obstacle avoidance system for existing differential-wheeled mobile robot. The ROS was installed under Ubuntu 14.04 on a Beaglebone Black embedded computer system. Then, the ROS was implemented together with the obstacle avoidance system to establish the communication between program nodes. The mobile robot was then designed and developed to examine the obstacle avoidance application. The debugging process was carried out to check the obstacle avoidance system application based on the communication between nodes. This process is important in examining the message publishing and subscribing from all nodes. The obstacle avoidance mobile robot has been successfully tested where the communication between nodes was running without any problem.