CATRAPILAS - A simple robotic platform

Abstract

This paper describes Catrapilas, a small robotic platform, designed to be capable of solving some well known robot problems. Among these are some of the most popular robotic contests, like Micro Mouse, Fire Fighting and Autonomous Driving. It describes the major decisions and details of the physical architecture of the robot, but emphasizes on the high level approach used to control the robotic agent. This approach is based on the creation of a 2D map of the agent's environment, which should contain all the information needed in order to solve the current problem. There is also a description of the implementation used for the Autonomous Driving Competition, from the 2005 Portuguese National Robotics Festival, and the results that were obtained. There is a focus on the robot's ability to accomplish the objectives of the contest, and how this proved that the concept and ideas behind Catrapilas are correct. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.