VolksBot - A Construction Kit for Multi-purpose Robot Prototyping

The development of mobile robotic systems is a demanding task regarding its complexity, required resources and skills in multiple fields such as software development, artificial intelligence, mechanical design, electrical engineering, signal processing, sensor technology or control theory. This holds true particularly for soccer playing robots, where additional aspects like high dynamics, cooperation and high physical stress have to be dealt with. In robot competitions such as RoboCup, additional skills in the domains of team, project and knowledge management are of importance. Having participated in RoboCup Middle Size League since 1998, Fraunhofer IAIS and FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg have developed six generations of different mobile robot platforms. Like many other teams we faced several difficulties. These systems were often monolithic, highly integrated prototypes that took a long time to develop, they were high in costs and hard to maintain. Also robots tend to grow old quite quickly when used frequently, put under high physical stress or when the robot’s hardware simply gets outdated after a few years. Fluctuation of people combined with long training times for new team members and loss of knowledge are other difficulties we frequently experienced. In this chapter, we present methodologies to cope with such diverse difficulties by using modular, component-oriented design approaches for mobile robot prototyping. The approach should enable developers to focus on their specific domain, still being able to have a clear understanding of the entire system by help of different levels of abstraction and well defined interfaces to hardware and software modules. Furthermore, (re-)usability should be maximized by having well documented system components of manageable size. A concrete implementation of such an approach will be presented by way of the VolksBot concept (Wisspeintner et al. 2005). This project was started in September 2002 with the goal to create a multi-purpose, cost-effective and robust robot construction kit for advanced research, education as well as for application oriented prototyping. Originally being applied to indoor scenarios like RoboCup Middle Size, since 2004 the concept was extended to fulfil the demands of more real-life applications like outdoor use, higher payload, velocity or scalability in morphology and hardware configuration of the platform.