The Pathfinder Zybot: an Open Platform Telepresence Robot

• Main Authors: András Erdős, József Zákány, Stefan Oniga
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: UT Press Publishing House 2016-12-01
• Series: Carpathian Journal of Electronic and Computer Engineering
• Subjects: Assistive-robot; navigation; mapping; autonomous; Zybo
• Online Access: http://cjece.ubm.ro/vol/9-2016/n2/1611.13-9205.pdf

This paper presents an Open Platform Telepresence Robot developed by authors. The main goal was to develop an Open Platform for development of telepresence or assistive robots. The system has two main parts, a PC application for the users of the robot, and the robot itself. A friendly GUI was developed in order to control and track the machine. The robot is built using an iRobot Roomba as the base platform. The robot’s main component is an FPGA based ZYBO development board that it is connected to a lot of peripherals. It runs an Ubuntu Linux operating system, which provides a solid base for the software. The PC application and the robot software are communicating with each other, using a unique protocol developed by authors. The robot also has a lot of useful features, such as remote controlled or autonomous movement, obstacle detection and avoidance, video streaming of the on board camera images, etc. Such a robot it is intended to be used for daily life assistance of older adults or persons with different type of disabilities.