Sociobot Control System Design and Prototype Development

Abstract

In this thesis, a foundation is laid for a control system designed and built on a previously designed robot chassis. The objective is to design and built a prototype of a control system that allows for three different driving modes. A manual control mode allowing a user to control the robot remotely, an autonomous mode allowing the robot to safely avoid objects and people while driving around a room and finally a target tracking mode were the robot is to follow a user. The control system is comprised of various components that, when combined, qualify as an embedded control system. The control system controls actuators based on incoming sensor data from multiple sensors. The thesis includes an analysis, comparing and evaluating various components as well as a detailed explanation of the development process performed in order to implement a suitable solution to the objective. A prototype of the control system was designed, built and assembled. These include the design of circuits, component containers, sensor brackets, component testing and firmware development. Based on the final design, the robot that can be controlled manually with a computer keyboard wirelessly and the ability to switch to an autonomous mode were the robot drives around a room and successfully avoids detected obstacles. Groundwork was laid for further development of the control system in order to achieve the target tracking mode, which includes the setup of the Open Source Computer Vision library and the ability to stream video using the library. Target tracking could not be fully implemented at the time of writing.