A User Friendly Software Framework for Mobile Robot Control

We are interested in designing applications for autonomous mobile robots and robot swarms to accomplish tasks such as terrain analysis, search and rescue, and chemical plume source tracing. These tasks require robots to avoid obstacles and reach a goal. We use X80Pro mobile robots designed and developed by Dr.Robot Inc. for task applications. The vendor provided software framework with graphical user interface(GUI) allows robots only to be controlled remotely. The development of new robot control applications require developers to acquire in-depth knowledge of MicrosoftActiveX controls and C# programming language. In this paper, we present a new software framework for X80Pro robots that will allow even a novice C++ programmer to design and implement autonomous mobile robot applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of our software framework using behaviorbased and physics based control algorithms where a X80Pro robot avoid obstacles to reach a goal.