Real-Time Motion Control of a Spark Robot Using the Robot Operating System and MATLAB

With the rapid development of science and technology, robots begin to penetrate into people’s daily life from the industrial field or other special fields, and the development of robotics technology is becoming simpler. As an open source meta-operation system for robots, ROS has been recognized by many developers because of its outstanding advantages, which has become a standardized platform for robotic development. MATLAB has powerful data processing ability and graphical programming, by which a large number of mature algorithms can be used. Combining MATLAB with ROS, it can greatly reduce the difficulty of robot development. This paper presents a convenient and fast method for robot motion control. It takes a Spark robot as the development object to realize and study the performance of tracking a moving object. Spark is a two-wheel differential-controlled robot with multiple infrared obstacle avoidance sensors, which can be equipped with depth cameras, laser sensors, infrared imaging sensors, sound sensors and other instruments, being suitable for online condition inspection and monitoring. Experimental evaluation show that the proposed method allows the realization of different motions, verifying that this application development method can meet the requirement for not only the performances but being convenient and fast that can be achieved with little programming skills.