Low-cost solution in international robotic challenge: Lessons learned by Tuscany Robotics Team at ERL Emergency Robots 2017

European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency Robots is an outdoor robotics contest focusing on multidomain emergency response scenarios. In this context, the deployed robots are expected to fulfill land, underwater, and flying cooperative tasks which emulate real-world situations inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident. Participation of the Tuscany Robotics Team at ERL Emergency Robots 2017 was deeply affected by damage to (and resulting unavailability of) the unmanned ground vehicle to be used in the competition. This damage occurred 3 days before the challenge. An entirely new working mobile platform was built from scratch using a low-cost chassis. It was able to compete with the other participants in the challenge and achieved various tasks ((Formula presented.) of the tasks completed by the best performer). The paper provides a complete description of the work carried out and the system used during the competition. The development was based on low-cost solutions, in particular: Adoption of open-hardware and open-software technology, providing cheap and fast-prototyping solutions. Use of smartphones, allowing sophisticated sensors to be exploited in an affordable way. Employment of Cloud infrastructures, to reduce the computational burden of offloading heavy processes. Results of this experience represent a concrete demonstration, showing that even low-cost solutions can achieve complex tasks, such as those required for the European robotic competition. The presented lessons learned aim to provide guidelines useful for reacting to unexpected events. Finally, the team was honored with the Creativity Award “for building a land robot from scratch in less than 2 days when their ground platform broke.”