Developing a Remotely Operated Portable Mobile Robot

The Tsukuba Challenge is one of the few technical events where it is permitted to conduct demonstrations of autonomous mobile robots on a public road in a city. Thus, when limited trial runs are available several times per year, domestic and foreign teams must bring robots to the venue and conduct experiments using robots and observation instruments. For a team located far away from the venue, the cost of transporting equipment and staff each time becomes prohibitive. In this research, to reduce the cost of transporting robots and personnel, we design and develop a mobile robot platform that is easy to transport and deploy. Additionally, to allow remote experts to generate maps and routes without visiting the site, we construct a remote operating system that operates over the internet. In this paper, we describe the portable mobile robot platform and the software configuration needed for remote operation. Then, we report the results of our verification test.