Robot Operating System Compatible Mobile Robots for Education and Research

The use of mobile robots has inevitably increased in recent years. The increase in the companies that produce products in this field, the popularity of the studies in the robotic field and the technological competence to serve many different areas have revealed this increase in usage. The importance of mobile robots used as health, education, pro-duction, logistics, defense industry and space equipment is now more important than before. The fact that robotic education can be reduced to a very young age, the production and coding of simple robots with easily accessible parts is also an important factor in this field. At this point, the effect of educational robots on the spread of robotic technol-ogy cannot be denied.

Wi-Fi Based Indoor Positioning System For Mobile Robots By Using Particle Filter

Mobile robots have the capability to work in real-time autonomously. Autonomous behavior is strictly dependent on knowing the position of the mobile robot. The positioning of a mobile robot in an indoor area is a difficult task for only one sensor information is used. We proposed a system and method to locate the mobile robot via fusing signals from WIFI and odometer data via particle filter. In this study, the Particle filter is a well-known filter that is used for indoor positioning of mobile robots. The proposed system includes two parts that are RFKON system and evarobot for data collection and experiments. The Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements of the WiFi access points that are located in any environment are used to locate a stationary mobile robot in one floor area via SIS Particle Filter. RSS measurements from the RFKON database are used and the average location error is 0.7606 and 0.1495 m for 300 and 1000 particles respectively.

ROS Based Visual Programming Tool for Mobile Robot Education and Applications

Visual programming languages (VPLs) provide coding without typing texts. VPL makes coding easy to programmers with automatically adding usually used some code structure. Beginners in coding have generally two main challenges; transforming ideas into logical expressions and syntax errors. Syntax errors are impossible with VPLs because of there is no forgotten parentheses and semicolons. VPLs provide to focus on algorithm for programmers. VPL is a new trend for educational robotic environments. In this study, Robot Operating System (ROS) compatible web based visual programming system has been developed for evarobot. ROS provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. Blockly has been used as VPL for the study and to generate / use blocks (commucation, sensing etc.). Some applications were generated like teleoperation, SLAM and wander etc. In this system, communication between server and client is supported by rosbridge package. Web page connected to ROS which runs on server using roslibjs library. Rosbridge provides a JSON API to ROS functionality for non-ROS programs.

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) tool for Robot Operating System (ROS)

Nowadays, prognostics-aware systems are increasingly used in many systems and it is critical for sustaining autonomy. All engineering systems, especially robots, are not perfect. Absence of failures in a certain time is the perfect system and it is impossible practically. In all engineering works, we must try to predict or minimize/prevent failures in the system. Failures in the systems are generally unknown, so prediction of these failures and reliability of the system is made by prediction process. Reliability analysis is important for the improving the system performance, extending system lifetime, etc. Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) includes reliability, safety, predictive fault detection / isolation, advanced diagnostics / prognostics, component lifecycle tracking, health reporting and information management, etc. This study proposes an open source robot prognostic and health management tool using model-based methodology namely "Prognostics and Health Management tool for ROS". This tool is a generic tool for using with any kind of robot (mobile robot, robot arm, drone etc.) with compatible with ROS. Some features of this tool are managing / monitoring robots' health, RUL, probability of task completion (PoTC) etc. User is able to enter the necessary equations and components information (hazard rates, robot configuration etc.) to the PHM tool and the other sensory data like temperature, humidity, pressure, load etc. In addition to these, a case study is conducted for the mobile robots (OTA) using this tool.