Introduction

An area that is developing at a fast rate is robotics. With the increase of the production lines, and the higher demand of products, robots enter everyday work to help us achieve better results.

In order for us to enter the robotics world, as robots entered our world, we need to start in a small scale. As such, this project targeted the development of a small simulated robot, so that we can understand the basic concepts of robot mobility.

This project was made using the open source Robot Operating System, ROS, which is a set of software libraries and tools that help building robot applications and systems. It is a widely used framework that has a strong presence in the academic field. It allows implementations both in C++ and in Python.

The main library that was used to develop inside ROS was the Simple Two Dimensional Robot Simulator, STDR Simulator. This library implements a distributed, server-client based architecture where each node can run in a different machine and communicate using ROS interfaces. STDR Simulator, also provides a graphical user interface, GUI, developed in QT, for visualization purposes and allows creation of robots and other tools. It is a simple and intuitive library with a low learning curve that allows the fast implementation of a prototype, and as it also provides a GUI, it is good to test concepts.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the frameworks and the way they are implemented, we developed a simple robot with the objective of tracking the inside and outside wall of a map with a ‘v’ shape or a ‘w’ shape.