LIDAR for Scribbler 2

Abstract

This paper describes a project to enhance a commonly used educational robot, the Parallax Scribbler 2 (S2), by adding more sensor capabilities and making it truly autonomous. The S2 is a popular platform in high school and college robotics courses yet it lacks significant capacity that is compensated by often pairing it with Fluke 2, an interface/controller card developed by a third party group. However, while improving the robot's capability the Fluke card provides limited support for truly autonomous navigation, mainly due to the simplicity of some of the sensors as well as the technology used. In this project, the Fluke is replaced by a LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) sensor with communication supported by a IOIO-OTG (pronounced “yo-yo-O-T-G”) developer board and an inexpensive Android device. The resulting platform will allow for more reliable mapping capabilities as well as open the door for S2 based autonomous navigation to be studied and developed as part of robotics education.