Scratchy: A Lightweight Modular Autonomous Robot for Robotic Competitions
This addresses the practical problem of accessibility for student teams in robotics competitions, though it is an incremental hardware/design improvement.
The authors tackled the problem of high costs for student teams participating in robotic competitions by developing Scratchy, a lightweight modular robot that can be assembled in under an hour and fits into hand luggage, reducing funding hurdles.
We present Scratchy---a modular, lightweight robot built for low budget competition attendances. Its base is mainly built with standard 4040 aluminium profiles and the robot is driven by four mecanum wheels on brushless DC motors. In combination with a laser range finder we use estimated odometry -- which is calculated by encoders -- for creating maps using a particle filter. A RGB-D camera is utilized for object detection and pose estimation. Additionally, there is the option to use a 6-DOF arm to grip objects from an estimated pose or generally for manipulation tasks. The robot can be assembled in less than one hour and fits into two pieces of hand luggage or one bigger suitcase. Therefore, it provides a huge advantage for student teams that participate in robot competitions like the European Robotics League or RoboCup. Thus, this keeps the funding required for participation, which is often a big hurdle for student teams to overcome, low. The software and additional hardware descriptions are available under: https://github.com/homer-robotics/scratchy.