An inexpensive robot platform for teleoperation and experimentation

Most commercially-available robots are either aimed at the research community, or are designed with a single purpose in mind. The extensive hobbyist community has tended to focus on the hardware and the low-level software aspects. We claim that there is a need for a low-cost, general-purpose robot, accessible to the hobbyist community, with sufficient computation and sensing to run “research-grade” software. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of such a robot. We explicitly outline our design goals, and show how a capable robot can be assembled from off-the-shelf parts, for a modest cost, by a single person with only a few tools. We also show how the robot can be used as a low-cost telepresence platform, giving the system a concrete purpose beyond being a low-cost development platform.