Robotino is a mobile robot system made by ''

Festo Festo is a German automation company based in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany. Festo produces and sells pneumatic and electrical control systems and drive technology for factories and process automation. Festo Didactic also offers industrial ed ...

Didactic'', and used for educational, training and research purposes.

Operation

Robotino is based on an omnidirectional drive assembly, which enables the system to roam freely. The robot is controlled by an industry-standard PC system, which is powerful enough to plan routes for fully autonomous driving. Via a WLAN-Link, Robotino can send all sensor readings to an external PC. In the other direction, control commands can be issued by the external PC. This way, control programs can run on the external PC or on Robotino directly. Mixed mode or shared control are also possible. For users with little prior robotics knowledge, Robotino can be readily programmed in its “native” programming environment RobotinoView II. More experienced programmers may find it useful that the robot can also be programmed in C,

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, .NET,

Matlab MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

Simulink Simulink is a MATLAB-based graphical programming environment for modeling, simulating and analyzing multidomain dynamical systems. Its primary interface is a graphical block diagramming tool and a customizable set of block libraries. It offers t ...

Labview Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a system-design platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The graphical language is named "G"; not to be confused with G-co ...

and

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (Microsoft RDS, MRDS) is a discontinued Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation that was aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handled a wide variety of robot hardware. I ...

Hardware

The omnidirectional drive consists of three

Mecanum wheel The mecanum wheel is an omnidirectional wheel design for a land-based vehicle to move in any direction. It is sometimes called the Swedish wheel or Ilon wheel after its inventor, Bengt Erland Ilon (1923–2008), who conceived of the concept w ...

s, all of which are individually controllable. These wheels are arranged at angles of 120°. Robotino has a bumper sensor around its circumference, infrared distance sensors, a color camera with VGA resolution, optical wheel encoders, power measurement for the entire system and the various motors, as well as a battery voltage monitor. Moreover, as optional additional sensors, Robotino can be equipped with a precise laser scanner, a gyroscope, and an

indoor positioning system An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a network of devices used to locate people or objects where GPS and other satellite technologies lack precision or fail entirely, such as inside multistory buildings, airports, alleys, parking garages, and un ...

(created by

Evolution Robotics Evolution Robotics was an American technological company based in Pasadena, California. It specialized in robotics technologies with their product range covering computer vision, localization and autonomous navigation. Evolution Robotics coope ...

). For signal input and output Robotino has several interfaces: * USB * Ethernet * 8 digital and 8 analog inputs * 8 digital outputs * additional motor output for driving high loads * additional encoder input Power is supplied by two 12V/5Ah lead-acid batteries or optionally by two 12V/9Ah NiMH batteries.

External links

{{Commons category
Robotino at Festo Didactic

Robotino wiki

Robotino forum
Educational robots Three-wheeled robots Robots of Germany 21st-century robots