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ABSTRACT

Mobile robotics is a research area that has witnessed incredible advances for
the last decades. Within this well-studied domain of mobile robotics, our area of
interest is robots that inhabit in unmodified office-like environments that are designed
for and shared with people. Issues like mapping, self-localization, and autonomous
navigation in an indoor environment are popular issues in the field of autonomous
robots. This thesis describes how a Robot Operating System (ROS) based control
system is used with a mobile robot for self-localization, indoor mapping and
autonomous navigation in an office like environment. The robot, made from an
Arduino board, cheap sensors, motors and wheels, has been programmed using C++
language on Arduino and ROS. The system communicates in real time with a PC
where the map is drawn using RVIZ application. The robot has the components of a
Arduino, Rplidar and Ubuntu OS based Computer, which consists of a circular
structure and two motors connected to their corresponding wheels. The robot also has
two encoders and Rplidar. The processor is an Arduino Mega board and laser scanner
to produce map and show it on the computer by using RVIZ application. RVIZ
application is also use to command the robot to get the location of the target.