MILO - Mobile Intelligent Linux Robot

This paper describes the architecture of a low cost autonomous/guided mobile robot. This robot is being developed at Indian Institute of Information Technology (Allahabad, India) as a part of a research for the use of mobile robots in day-to-day life. The project is named MILO (Mobile Intelligent Linux rObot). The robot has been designed from commercial off the shelf components, thus reducing the prototype design time. The robot incorporates stereoscopic vision for long range obstacle detection and infrared proximity sensor for short range obstacle detection. The stereoscopic vision for obstacle detection utilizes laser targeting to achieve optimization in determining distances at a much lower cost than the commercially available range scanners. The robot also has a HCI (Human Computer Interface) via a multimedia interface. The control software of the robot is capable of taking voice commands from a user who has the master rights to robot. It utilizes probabilistic reasoning approach. The entire software and control firmware of the robot has been designed with an embedded approach in open-source Linux which makes it easily portable over different hardware architectures. In the firmware the kernel of Linux used was 2.6.8-1.358. Control of the robot using the video feed from the on board cameras has been achieved.