AN APPLIED MODULAR APPROACH TO BUILD SCALABLE MOBILE ROBOTS

This application-oriented paper presents vital components that are essential for building a scalable mobile robot. With a plethora of resources available at hand and on the internet, it is very important to choose the right materials, design, and build procedures so that there is no wastage of resources during the build process and that the mobile robot works efficiently. Moreover, this task becomes more complicated when we are dealing with large scale human-sized mobile robots. This is because all the electronic components that we use for building small hobby robots are unfit because of their low current and voltage handling capacity, thus enabling us to adopt more power-hungry electronics capable of handling large voltage and current. As a result, the risk posed by these electronic components also increases since we are now dealing with large current and power devices, sometimes taking power directly from the sockets. At the same time, design constraints placed by their large size along with which the right motors and motor-drivers are to be chosen, their autonomy, the processing power of the boards, their inter-process communication, and computer intelligence are to be taken into consideration, involving various sub-fields of computer, electrical and mechanical engineering, etc. This paper, therefore, addresses all these concerns and provides a viable solution that involves minimalistic use of components.