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Mobile robots are currently in use in a variety off application areas, including planetary exploration, hazardous environment remediation, nuclear power plant inspections, bomb removal, search and rescue, surveillance, unmanned combat systems, material transport systems, office mail delivery, hospital meal and medication delivery, industrial floor cleaning, and domestic vacuuming. In research and education, mobile robot platforms offer a variety of engineering challenges, including rough-terrain mobility, motion planning, machine vision, pattern recognition, multi-agent coordination, obstacle avoidance, behavioral programming, sensory integration and machine learning, to name a few. Progress in these areas will enable more competent robots in the above application areas, ultimately leading to a potentially huge industry in domestic robots.

A current barrier to progress in mobile robotics is the cost and technical sophistication required to engage in mobile-robot research and education. At present, relatively competent mobile robots cost $30,000 to $60,000, which makes them inaccessible to most researchers and educators. At the low-cost end, the LEGO Mindstorms robot kit, in the $200 range, has been widely popular, although its computational capacity and programmability restrictions are limiting.

More recently, a variety of alternative educational robot designs have emerged with varying responses to issues of cost, processor power, software development tools, communications and interfacing to sensors and actuators. However, these custom solutions generally do not enjoy the benefits of mass production nor professional operating systems and professional software development environments.

To achieve more attractive price vs. performance, this project was developed as a system that integrates low-cost commercial products to realize a powerful and flexible solution.