English

SMARTmBOT: A ROS2-based Low-cost and Open-source Mobile Robot Platform

Robotics 2022-03-18 v1 Hardware Architecture Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

This paper introduces SMARTmBOT, an open-source mobile robot platform based on Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2). The characteristics of the SMARTmBOT, including low-cost, modular-typed, customizable and expandable design, make it an easily achievable and effective robot platform to support broad robotics research and education involving either single-robot or multi-robot systems. The total cost per robot is approximately $210, and most hardware components can be fabricated by a generic 3D printer, hence allowing users to build the robots or replace any broken parts conveniently. The SMARTmBot is also equipped with a rich range of sensors, making it competent for general task scenarios, such as point-to-point navigation and obstacle avoidance. We validated the mobility and function of SMARTmBOT through various robot navigation experiments and applications with tasks including go-to-goal, pure-pursuit, line following, and swarming. All source code necessary for reading sensors, streaming from an embedded camera, and controlling the robot including robot navigation controllers is available through an online repository that can be found at https://github.com/SMARTlab-Purdue/SMARTmBOT.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.08903,
  title  = {SMARTmBOT: A ROS2-based Low-cost and Open-source Mobile Robot Platform},
  author = {Wonse Jo and Jaeeun Kim and Ruiqi Wang and Jeremy Pan and Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran and Byung-Cheol Min},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.08903},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

6 pages, 7 figures, and this paper was submitted to the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:16:16.174Z