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UGV1 Readme
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UGV1 is an experimental mobile robot platform. This robot serves as my test-bed to experiment with mobile robot navigation and control algorithms. This is a project that is probably going to be eternally in work-in-progress state.

The primary hardware components are:
1. DFRobot HCR mobile robot frame (http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=37_111&product_id=63)
2. DFRobot Sensor/motor driver board (http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=51_105&product_id=99)
3. Google Nexus7 tablet running Ubuntu 13.04 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7)

The Nexus7 mounted on the robot serves as the control computer. I have a cheap 4-port USB hub plugged into the Nexus (using a USB on-the-go cable) to hot-plug external IO. The Nexus communicates with the sensor/motor driver board via it's RS232 port (I have a USB-to-serial adapter plugged into the USB hub to make this happen). On-board sensors can be connected directly to the sensor/motor driver board - it provides 8 analogue inputs, 11 digital IO (8 of which can be configured as PWM servo outputs), and i2c and RS485 interfaces.

The software architecture consist of 'Agents' - independant nodes that implement computation and communication. Agents communicate with each other over a local area network using UDP multicast (I use LCM - Light weight communication and marshelling - library for this. See http://lcm.googlecode.com/). The agent architecture allows distributed computing - nodes be distributed across different bits of hardware as long as they are all on the same local area network. The Nexus runs the ControllerAgent, which controls the robot. A JoystickAgent on a laptop (or even an Android tablet, if LCM can be ported to it) can then be used to control the robot remotely.

Unfortunately, the camera on the Nexus isn't supported in Ubuntu yet. I currently use an external USB camera for FPV (using GoogleTalk - nothing fancy). This archive provides all the code necessary to get the robot up and running. My preffered IDE is Qt Creator. External dependancies are Qt5 and LCM. You will also need my companion library Grape (https://github.com/cvilas/grape) which provides few cross-platform generic functions. On windows, you will additionally require Visual C++ (I use the freely available Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/express) 

Vilas Chitrakaran, May 2013