Highly Adaptable Hardware Architecture for Scientific and Industrial Mobile Robots

The growing field of mobile robotics produces various types of robot systems for different applications. However, the development of new robots often requires the design of new hardware systems which is time consuming and susceptible to errors. Here, we present a modular and highly flexible hardware architecture that allows to simplify the adaptation of the robot to a new task and reduces the time for the development of a new robot system. This hardware architecture was developed according to industrial standards and is applicable to industrial and to research mobile robot systems. This paper describes the underlying demands to the hardware, the technical solutions and the designed modules. Moreover, we show the successful integration of the new architecture in three different robot systems (indoor and outdoor).