A Low-Cost Autonomous Mobile Robot for the Eurobot Competition

The Eurobot Open challenge provides an interesting and challenging arena for the research, development and testing of autonomous mobile robots. It is aimed towards young people and students, and seek to, in their words encourage the practice of sciences in a friendly atmosphere . Even though anyone can participate in the competition, it is difficult to compete for the top spots without large budgets and backing from commercial sponsors. Teams from leading universities are routinely spending as much as 100,000 NOK on their projects. In this thesis, it is investigated whether it is possible to design and implement an autonomous mobile robot for the Eurobot 2015 challenge on a limited budget, and still be able to compete against these teams. An autonomous mobile robot capable of solving the tasks presented by the Eurobot challenge has been successfully designed and implemented for less than 10,000 NOK, which is a fraction of the amount spent on the robot by the leading teams. The robot proved its worth in the international competition, held in Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland in May of 2015, by successfully completing its matches, scoring an acceptable amount of points, and winning two of its matches. The ambitious goal of competing with the top teams was not achieved, and the results of this thesis suggest that it is difficult to do so without a higher budget and more sophisticated components