Wireless Sensor-based Control of Mobile Robots Motion

Gyula Mester
University of Szeged, Department of Informatics, Szeged, Hungary Department of Informatics, Subotica Tech, Subotica, Serbia gmester@inf.u-szeged.hu
Abstract The paper deals with the wireless sensor-based remote control of mobile robots motion in an unknown environment with obstacles using the Bluetooth wireless transmission and Sun SPOT technology. The Sun SPOT is designed to be a flexible development platform, capable of hosting widely differing application modules. Web technologies are changing the education in robotics. A feature of remote control laboratories is that users can interact with real mobile robot motion processes through the Internet. Motion control of mobile robots is very important research field today, because mobile robots are a interesting subject both in scientific research and practical applications. In this paper the object of the remote control is the Boe-Bot mobile robot from Parallax. This Boe-Bot mobile robot is the simplest, low-cost platform and the most suitable for the small-sized, light, battery-driven autonomous vehicle. The vehicle has two driving wheels and the angular velocities of the two wheels are independently controlled. When the vehicle is moving towards the target in an unknown environment with obstacles, an avoiding strategy is necessary. A remote control program has been implemented.

I. INTRODUCTION This paper gives the wireless sensor-based remote control of mobile robots motion in an unknown environment with obstacles using the Bluetooth wireless transmission and Sun SPOT technology. Motion control of mobile robots is a very important research field today, because mobile robots are a very interesting subject both in scientific research and practical applications. The object of the remote control is the BoeBot mobile robot from Parallax (Fig. 1.).

This Boe-Bot mobile robot is the simplest, low-cost platform and the most suitable for the small-sized, light, battery-driven autonomous vehicle. The vehicle has two driving wheels and the angular velocities of the two wheels are independently controlled. When the vehicle is moving towards the target in an unknown environment with obstacles, an avoiding strategy is necessary. Wireless sensor networking is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge in recent years. A wireless sensor network is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions. Wireless sensor networks collect data from the environment and send it to a destination site where the data can be observed, memorized and analyzed. At present time, due to economic and technological reasons, most available wireless sensor devices are very constrained in terms of computational, memory, power, and communication capabilities. The research on wireless sensor networks is concentrated on design of improving the energy- and computational effectiveness. The main goal is to find new algorithms and protocols [1]. The paper deals with the Bluetooth wireless transmission and Sun SPOT technology. Sun SPOT is a small electronic device made by Sun Microsystems. The Sun SPOT is designed to be a flexible development platform, capable of hosting widely differing application modules. The aim of integration of remote hands on experiments into control of robotics systems is to minimize the gap between the robot theory and applications to teach students the use of remote robot control and to decrease the education costs [2]. The paper is organized as follows: - Section 1: Introduction. - Web-based remote control of mobile robots in an unknown environment with obstacles is given in Section 2. - In Section 3 Sun SPOT based remote control of mobile robots is proposed. - Conclusions are given in Section 4. II. WEB-BASED REMOTE CONTROL OF MOBILE ROBOTS IN AN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENT WITH OBSTACLES Web technologies are changing the education in robotics. The one of the most promising new tools for education of engineering is remote control, which is very useful for mobile robot control development. Many distance learning paradigms have been developed in

Figure 1. The Boe-Bot Mobile Robot

978-1-4244-5349-8/09/$26.00 2009 IEEE

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recent years. A feature of remote labs is that users can interact with real mobile robot motion processes through the Internet. The Web enables distance education, learning anytime and anywhere, learners do not have to travel, they are offered new visualisation possibilities, flexible delivery, faster training and education costs reduction. Remote control laboratories are based on sharing the same resources over the internet. The process of creating the remote robot control is a complex task [2]. The complexity of the remote architecture design increases when the remote lab allows the user to design the controller within the remote web session. A remote laboratory can use a wellknown software environment, such as Matlab/Simulink and Lab VIEW. From the Robotics Laboratory (University of Szeged) home page it is possible to access to the Control Interface of Boe Bot mobile robot (Figure 2.):

Figure 3. Forward motion of the Boe Bot mobile robot

Figure 2. The Control Interface of the Boe Bot mobile robot

Through this interface it is possible to choose the predefined Boe Bot mobile robot controller. A remote control program has been implemented. The host system connects to the mobile robot with the Bluetooth wireless transmission technology with the following characteristic parameters: Standard: IEEE 802.15.1 Frequency band: 2.4 GHz Network topology: 8 active nodes Data rate: 1 Mb/s Range: 10 /100 m Battery life: Days Applications: data and voice access, ad hoc networking Cost: relatively low. When the vehicle is moving towards the target and the sensors detect an obstacle, an avoiding strategy is necessary [3], [4], [5]. While the mobile robot is moving it is important to compromise between avoiding the obstacles and moving towards the target position. With obstacles present in the unknown environment, the mobile robot reacts based on both the sensed information of the obstacles and the relative position of the target [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. Through the interface the user can start experiment, change some controller parameters, may choose the reference to apply and view the mobile robot positions (Figure 3, 4, 5, 6).

Figure 4. Left-side motion of the Boe-Bot mobile robot

Figure 5. Right-side motion of the Boe-Bot mobile robot

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We used the SunSPOT base station to read a file from the controlling computer and send its contents to the second free range SPOT (Fig. 7). The second SunSPOT when receiving the data in turn opens up its outputs depending on what it received. These outputs control the speed of the wheels individually. The Hardware basically centers around Sun SPOTs and DC Motors controlled by Basic Stamp. The Sun SPOT base station will send data to Sun SPOT on mobile robot which will drive the Basic Stamp controller to DC IO pins. The microcontroller will drive the Motors which will run the Boe-Bot mobile robot.

Figure 6. Backward motion of the Boe-Bot mobile robot

Users can watch the on-line videos provided by the web cameras. With obstacles present in the unknown environment, the mobile robot reacts based on both the sensed information of the obstacles and the relative position of the target. In moving towards the target and avoiding obstacles, the mobile robot changes its orientation. When the obstacle in an unknown environment is very close, the mobile robot slows down and rapidly changes its orientation. The navigation strategy is to come as near to the target position as possible while avoiding collision with the obstacles in an unknown environment. SUN SPOT BASED REMOTE CONTROL OF MOBILE ROBOTS In this paper we have used: SunSPOT-s (Small Programmable Object Technology) to achieve remote control over a Boe-Bot mobile robot. For this task we have used 2 SunSPOT-s from the development kit. Sun SPOT's wireless protocol is ZigBee, standard: IEEE 802.15.4. Sun SPOTS are small, battery operated wireles sensors. It contains: 32-bit ARM920T CPU, 512KB RAM, with 4 Mb Flash memory. Wireless networking is based on ChipCon CC2420 following the 802.15.4 standard with integrated antenna and operates in the 2.4GHz to 2.4835GHz ISM unlicensed bands. The SPOT has flexible power management and can draw from rechargeable battery, USB host or be externally powered. The Sun SPOT is designed to be a flexible development platform, capable of hosting widely differing application modules. III.

Figure 7. The Boe-Bot mobile robot with Sun SPOT device

The Sun SPOT connection strategy is presented in Fig. 8.

Figure 8. Sun SPOT connection strategy

The control interface is similar from Fig. 2. Through the interface the user can start control experiment of mobile robots in Sun SPOT environment (Fig. 9.).

Figure 9. Control of mobile robot motion in Sun Spot environment

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Sun SPOTs are programmed in a Java programming language, with the Java VM run on the hardware itself [12]. Because of its Java implementation, programming the Sun SPOT is easy. The Software consists of two parts: first from the program used on the base station and from the program implemented on the free range SPOT [13]. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was partially supported by the TMOP4.2.2/08/1/2008-0008 program of the Hungarian National Development Agency. IV. CONCLUSIONS The paper deals with the wireless sensor-based remote control of mobile robots motion in an unknown environment with obstacles using the Bluetooth wireless transmission and Sun SPOT technology. Web technologies are changing the education in robotics. A feature of remote control laboratories is that users can interact with real mobile robot motion processes through the Internet. In this paper the object of the remote control is the BoeBot mobile robot from Parallax. The vehicle has two driving wheels and the angular velocities of the two wheels are independently controlled. When the vehicle is moving towards the target and the sensors detect an obstacle, an avoiding strategy is necessary. A remote control program has been implemented. The Sun SPOT is designed to be a flexible development platform, capable of hosting widely differing application modules. We used the SunSPOT base station to read a file from the controlling computer and send its contents to the second free range SPOT. The second SunSPOT when receiving the data in turn opens up its outputs depending on what it received. These outputs control the speed of the wheels individually. The Hardware basically centers around Sun SPOTs and DC Motors controlled by Basic Stamp. The Sun SPOT base station will send data to Sun SPOT on mobile robot which will drive the Basic Stamp controller to DC IO pins. The microcontroller will drive the Motors which will run the Boe-Bot mobile robot.

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