Making an Affordable Educational Guide Robot : EGR 1 Dr .

This paper describes the course of creating an affordable in-door Educational Guide Robot platform using recycled electronic and metal parts. An Arduino Uno and Mega were tested with a HC-06 Bluetooth module, and HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensors. We explore and discuss the effectiveness of the widely used and low cost HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors, and the Minoru webcam on an Arduino platform using open source software. We built a Bluetooth communication model with an Arduino Mega board and a Nexus 7 tablet that runs Android operating system. Our goals are to create an affordable educational robot platform for AI applications, to provide a quick and easy way to understand electronic communications between Arduino and Android tablet, to explore Android vision system and use it to guide the robot navigation. In the future, we will add position recognition feature to our Android application based on an image of a building blue print and guide visitors to any office, lab, and classroom in any building based on that particular building print. Introduction The electronic communication technology is evolving at an unbelievable speed. Much of this new technology is becoming widely accessible to everyone including people without specialized computing or engineering backgrounds. The gap between computer science and engineering is gradually disappearing due to resent advance of robotics research. Using robots to teach computer science and engineering is becoming more and more attractive. Countless robot platforms, as small as a Nano-robot, and as large as an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), were created using the state of the arts technology during the last a few decades. Step by step open source instructions posted on the Internet increased the momentum of the development of new technology, and stimulate the robotics industry to develop more robotics sensors, mechanical parts, and kits. We did a quick survey on the cost of research and commercial in-door navigation robot platforms. The price range is from $41k [1, 2] to $400k [3]. The $41k Health care and guide robot, called “Robovie” was introduced in 2010 Engadget Web Magazine [1, 2], and the state of the arts PR robots created by Willow Garage cost from $280k to $400k. We exclude another mile stone navigation robot by the K-Team [4] since it is too small in size (55mm) to be used as a guide robot. Not all the public end users can afford such prices. The demand for low cost and functional robotics platform increases every day. In this paper, we present our creation: a low cost and fully functional “Education Guide Robot” (EGR) that can be used as a platform for AI and Machine Learning applications. In the next section, we give a general review on current in-door guide robot platforms. Then we will present the overall design of our first version of EGR platform with a quick overview of the mechanical parts, electronic, and software architecture. Following the overall design, we will present and discuss our implementation and initial testing results. We will then, present our future plan in the last section of this paper. In-door Guide Robot Review In this section, we give an overview on the major development of current research on in-door guide robots including commercial products during the period time from 2005 to 2016.