Embedded Robotics: Mobile Robot Design and Applications with Embedded Systems

Thomas Bräunl

abr 2013 · Springer Science & Business Media

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t all started with a new robot lab course I had developed to accompany my I robotics lectures. We already had three large, heavy, and expensive mobile robots for research projects, but nothing simple and safe, which we could give to students to practice on for an introductory course. We selected a mobile robot kit based on an 8-bit controller, and used it for the first couple of years of this course. This gave students not only the enjoy ment of working with real robots but, more importantly, hands-on experience with control systems, real-time systems, concurrency, fault tolerance, sensor and motor technology, etc. It was a very successful lab and was greatly enjoyed by the students. Typical tasks were, for example, driving straight, finding a light source, or following a leading vehicle. Since the robots were rather inexpensive, it was possible to furnish a whole lab with them and to con duct multi-robot experiments as well. Simplicity, however, had its drawbacks. The robot mechanics was unreli able, the sensors were quite poor, and extendability and processing power were very limited. What we wanted to use was a similar robot at an advanced level.

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Thomas Bräunl is Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, Perth, where he founded and directs the Mobile Robot Lab and is also Director of the Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems (CIIPS). Professor Bräunl received a Diploma in Informatics in 1986 from Univ. Kaiserslautern, an MS in Computer Science in 1987 from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a PhD and Habilitation in Informatics in 1989 and 1994, respectively, from Univ. Stuttgart. He has worked in the past for BASF and DaimlerChrysler and has founded a company for innovative mobile robot design. Professor Bräunl’s research interests are robotics, vision, graphics, and concurrency. He is author of several research books and textbooks and has developed the EyeBot mobile robot family.