Sensor and connectivity board (SCB)for mobile robots

In this paper, a Sensor and Connectivity Board (SCB) is proposed to provide a simple serial interface to all sensor and actuator resources of a mobile robot. SCB was designed with the aim to provide a modular robot platform for swarm robotics research and application development, where simplicity and modularity are key-factors. The SCB is used to integrate all sensor modalities and the motor control into one logical device, which can be accessed through a USB port from any computer having USB host capability. This solution provides an easy access to all sensors, and the flexibility for selecting an embedded host computer to perform the high-level data processing, and motion control computing. The sensor set currently supported by the SCB includes SkyeModule M9 RFID reader, SRF-02 and SRF-10 sonars, Hokuyo URG-04LX laser sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, photo diode, thermometer, humidity and atmospheric pressure sensors, 3-axis magnetometer, and a real-time clock. SCB also features a build-in interface to iRobot’s Create mobile robot, but it can easily be connected to any robot platform with UART connection. In addition, SCB provides I²C, RS232, and SPI interfaces for adding new external devices to expand the functionalities of the SCB even further.