Design and development of an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) based on a ROS controller

An Autonomous Mobile Robot is a robot that runs and navigates by itself without human intervention. AMRs are foundamental for automating materials handling into warehouses. This thesis work ex- plains the procedure followed for designing and developing an AMR. The hardware components are chosen considering the way in which the robot will be controlled. A layered controlling approach is used. The high-level controller is a mini PC running ROS nodes. The ROS controller manages the actions that drivers have to perform and the data received from sensors. The medium-level controller translates the actions into signals that will be sent to the low-level controllers. The medium-level controller is an Arduino Mega, which sends PWM signals for controlling the speed of two BLDC motor wheels. The low-level controllers are two BLDC motor drivers that power, sense and drive the motor wheels. The Arduino implements a PI controller on the speed of rotation of each motorized wheel. Real tests are per- formed on the robot in order to evaluate the efficiency of the control- ling system. A future implementation consists in an integration of a LiDAR sensor in order to execute a SLAM algorithm, which will allow the robot to move autonomously in a space with obstacles.