Robo-Platform: A Robotic System for Recording Sensors and Controlling Robots

Abstract: Mobile smartphones compactly provide sensors such as cameras, IMUs, GNSS measurement units, and wireless and wired communication channels required for robotics projects. They are affordable, portable, and programmable, which makes them ideal for testing, data acquisition, controlling mobile robots, and many other robotic applications. A robotic system is proposed in this paper, consisting of an Android phone, a microcontroller board attached to the phone via USB, and a remote wireless controller station. In the data acquisition mode, the Android device can record a dataset of a diverse configuration of multiple cameras, IMUs, GNSS units, and external USB ADC channels in the rawest format used for, but not limited to, pose estimation and scene reconstruction applications. In robot control mode, the Android phone, a microcontroller board, and other peripherals constitute the mobile or stationary robotic system. This system is controlled using a remote server connected over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Experiments show that although the SLAM and AR applications can utilize the acquired data, the proposed system can pave the way for more advanced algorithms for processing these noisy and sporadic measurements. Moreover, the characteristics of the communication media are studied, and two example robotic projects, which involve controlling a toy car and a quadcopter, are included.