Researchers Aim to Solve Robotics Fragmentation "Once and For All" with the Arduino GIGA-Powered R4

A team of roboticists at the University of Lincoln's School of Engineering and Physical Science has released a standardized, open source hardware interface designed for the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) that, they say, will solve the problem of fragmentation, differing standards, and a reliance on proprietary parts "once and for all:" the Rapid Reproducible Robotics Research (R4) system.

"A key component of any robot is the interface between ROS 2 software and physical motors," the researchers explain. "New robots often use arbitrary, messy mixtures of closed and open motor drivers and error-prone physical mountings, wiring, and connectors to interface them. There is a need for a standardizing OSH [Open Source Hardware] component to abstract this complexity, as Arduino did for interfacing to smaller components. We present a OSH printed circuit board to solve this problem once and for all."

The R4 control board is designed to play host to an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi microcontroller development board — "acting," the team explains, "as an unusually large and robust shield," though designed more in the style of a carrier board. The Arduino GIGA was chosen, the researchers say, to ensure compatibility with existing ROS-based software stacks, meaning it can be used as a drop-in component without needing to re-engineer the software side of existing robotics projects.

Past the Arduino, the R4 board is designed to use existing open-hardware motor drivers and relays, enabling the creation of "fully open-hardware wheeled and arm robots," the researchers claim. As they're open, and the board itself standardized and connecting to an equally-standardized microcontroller development board, anything built with the R4 should be fully reproducible — a key feature for something being positioned as a platform for robotics research.

An R4 system can be put together for around $300, the team claims, with the device being targeted at skill levels from secondary- or high-school students up to undergrads and fully-fledged scientists. Five R4 boards had been built at the time of writing, using a commercial PCB manufacturing service and manual place-and-reflow for assembly, and had been used to create a variant of the OpenScout four-wheeled mobile robot and a version of the OpenPodCar as an alternative to the electronic systems previously employed in their design, plus in original projects including a three-servo arm.

"R4 is designed to enable 'no firmware programming' for end users," the researchers say, "allowing them to immediately connect a selection of standard devices and program them using ROS 2. This allows, for example, a research robotics lab to be stocked with a set of standard components such as OSMC motor drivers, relays, and motors, which along with R4, a box of aluminum profile, and batteries could be used somewhat like a LEGO collection to create many different robot forms. These could include mobile robots, robot arms, conveyor systems, and more."

The team's work has been published in the Journal of Open Hardware under open-access terms; design files and source code are available on Zenodo under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.