Hector Lightweight UGV based on Wild Thumper chassis

Hi everyone,

Oddbot recommended to post an entry here after I sent him one the videos accompanying this post. Our group at TU Darmstadt (http://www.gkmm.tu-darmstadt.de/rescue) demoed the feasibility of using a small, lightweight and low cost Unmanned Ground Vehicle based on the Wild Thumper chassis in the RoboCup Rescue Arena this year.

For demonstration purposes the vehicle is equipped with:

-Arduino based Motorcontroller (the one designed for the Thumper by Oddbot)
-FitPC2 Atom Z530 board
-2 SPC-1300 Cameras
-1 TPA-81 Thermopile sensor
-2 11.1V/3 cell 3300 mAh LiPo battery packs

The vehicle has a ROS (Robot Operating System, http://www.ros.org/wiki/ ) interface and is controlled using available ROS tools. The onboard video seen in one of the videos was recorded onboard the vehicle itself and is of a little better quality than that available to the operator, as we used a 160x120 5fps Theora encoded stream for teleoperation, to minimize bandwidth requirements in the RoboCup environment (with hundreds of teams sharing available WiFi frequencies).

It should be noted that development towards autonomous capabilities continues and that the build shown above was just for proof of concept purposes.