Design of a cheap tracked mobile robot for map building tasks

Disasters are inevitable part of the modern World. This paper introduces an easy to build, economical mobile robot that has been developed to aid the rescue effort by building a map automatically in such situations. The robot navigates in an unknown environment in which the only information it can obtain comes from onboard sensors and it needs to not only map the environment but to estimate its own location as well. Ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, encoders and a digital compass are used on the vehicle to determine the distance of the surrounding objects and to choose a suitable path. RF modules are used to communicate and transfer information to a distant computer. In order to present the effectiveness of the robot and the navigation algorithms we presented various experiments on planar environments. The scope of this ongoing research includes the construction of an autonomous system containing a robotic tracked vehicle and a telemetry system, as well as developing and testing novel planning algorithms.