Welcome to irobotics.org

irobotics.org is a web site aimed to provide information about bioinspired autonomous and semi-autonomous mobile robots. It is mainly focused in Behavior-Based Robotics and Evolutionary Robotics techniques applied to commercial and custom mobile robot platforms. In order to develop such a system, open source software toolkits are used. Some personal robotics-related projects are also hosted here.

Intelligent Mobile Robots

Autonomous mobile robots have a wide variety of applications in the industry as well as our daily life. The objective is to develop the core technology that can be used to control an autonomous / semi-autonomous mobile robot in a semi-structured environment. The robot has to cope with incomplete, uncertain, or inaccurate information while it transports materials in a factory, accomplishes tasks in the office, or carrying out chores around the house. The basic capabilities include: Navigation (w/ collision avoidance), Task planning and Environment exploration and dynamic map modelling.

White paper: Brooks, Rodney A. "A Robot That Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network" MIT AI Lab Memo 1091, February 1989.

Evolutionary Robotics

Evolutionary Robotics is a new technique for the automatic creation of autonomous robots. It is inspired upon the Darwinian principle of selective reproduction of the fittest. It is a new approach that looks at robots as autonomous artificial organisms that develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment without human intervention. Heavily drawing from natural sciences like biology and ethology, evolutionary robotics makes use of tools like neural networks, genetic algorithms, dynamic systems, and bio-morphic engineering. The resulting robots share with simple biological systems the characteristics of robustness, simplicity, small size, flexibility, and modularity. In evolutionary robotics, an initial population of artificial chromosomes, each encoding the control system of a robot, is randomly created and put into the environment. Each robot is then free to act (move, look around, manipulate) according to its genetically specified controller while its performance on various tasks is automatically evaluated. The fittest robots then "reproduce" by swapping parts of their genetic material with small random mutations. The process is repeated until the "birth" of a robot that satisfies the performance criteria.

Hosted projects


Robochair

Robochair

Robochair is a mobile robotics open platform for Assistive Technology applications. In other words, Robochair aims to be an open framework for future assistive applications and wheelchair-based robotics developments. It has been developed as add-on module for commercial powered wheelchairs. Its design is highly modular and based in open standards for easy extension, robust and low cost enough to be affordable to the most of people with disabilities.

Robochair project page


Wheelchair model for Gazebo 0.8

Wheelchair modelIt uses Pioneer2DX meshes for visualization and it has not any sensor yet. The main difference between any other mobile robot model and this wheelchair model is the definition of two front caster wheels (not omnidirectional ones). This tries to approach to real wheelchair locomotion behavior.

Wheelchair model page


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