Recently, the University of Twente has been donated 5 I-do social robot systems from KUKA (a German company). Due to the absence of documentation, these robots were not directly usable by the university.
The first aim of this research is to reverse engineer the robotic platform and to create new documentation on it. In this report, all the relevant functionalities of the components on the I-do platform are described.
The second part of this research is to use the new insights on the robot to adapt it to use at the university.
Upon discovery that it would be very difficult to reuse the original software, the decision was made to partially replace the custom hardware, allowing the circumvention of the original software. The design choices that came along with this new set of hardware are all explained in the report, along with the restructuring of the power management.
The new hardware made it possible to develop a new ROS-based software architecture from the ground up. This research goes into detail on which ROS packages were chosen and how they work together. The end product of this research is a working robot, that can be easily modified by students for use in projects. Because of this, a step-by-step approach to operating the basic functionalities of the robot is supplied in the appendix. This software structure could also be applied to different differential wheeled robots with a LiDAR scanner.