Using Robotis Bioloid systems for instructional Robotics

This is a report on our evaluation of Robotis´ Bioloid robotic systems for their use in a senior-level engineering robotics course. We had found that Robotis had provided robust embedded C and LabView libraries that we were able to intermix, adapt and extend for our needs in sensor and actuator interfacing, especially in ZigBee applications to create a mobile wireless sensor network whereas the PC acted as the base station to 3 carbots sending back their NIR sensor data and the number of node hops needed for a data packet to get back to base. In the area of harmonizing multiple controllers on a single robotic platform, Robotis did not have tools readily usable for us, but we managed to develop a basic motion capture tool to work on a quadruped robot platform in a master-slave controllers configuration.