A Sense-Think-Act Architecture for Low-Cost Mobile Robotics

Abstract

The use of low cost devices to build autonomous robotic systems has gown significantly over recent years. The availability of high quality, low cost micro processors has only furthered this, and the subsequent development in programming paradigms. Development boards, such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi products, have become a standard in a wide range of these robotic projects. However, there is no universally accepted architecture for using these boards for autonomous robotics. As these are commodity components, any solution must be resilient to any potential failure. This paper investigates the modulation of a robotic platform, to produce a stable and reliable base on which to build automated devices. A further, and critical, motivation is to create a fail safe system in which the loss of a module does not affect performance.