{Development of a mobile manipulator robot kit for educational purposes

This thesis focuses on designing, building, and developing a prototype of a mobile robot base for a manipulator mobile robot using the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 as a part of a larger project conducted by the mechatronics department at the University of Agder. This thesis has four main goals: 1) Design an affordable mobile robot base that fits the uArm manipulator. 2) Develop the required ROS2 packages for the selected hardware components in order to perform mobile robot localization, mapping, and autonomous navigation using the SLAM toolbox and Nav2 framework. 3) Construct a prototype of the designed mobile robot base. 4) Test the developed ROS2 packages by performing autonomous navigation in a dynamic environment. The test results showed that the Uiabot prototype succeeded in building a 2D representation of the environment, navigating successfully in this dynamic environment, and avoiding static and dynamic objects