Integrating Arduino-based Educational Mobile Robots in ROS

This article presents the full integration of compact educational mobile robotic platforms built around an Arduino controller board in the Robotic Operating System (ROS). To that end, a driver interface in ROS was created to drastically decrease the development time, providing hardware abstraction and intuitive operation mode, allowing researchers to focus essentially in their main research motivation. Moreover, the full integration in ROS provided by the driver enables the use of several tools for data analysis, easiness of interaction between multiple robots, sensors and teleoperation devices, thereby targeting engineering education. To validate the approach, diverse experimental field tests were conducted using different Arduino-based robotic platforms.