What was the project about?

During my time in Toulouse as a PhD student in the RAP (Robotics, Action and Perception) Team of the LAAS-CNRS I started to refit an iRobot Roomba 531 to be utilized as a platform to teach robotics to high-school-students. On this page I would like to share some thoughts on this undertaking. If you are interested to see some of my results take a look at the Further Information section.

The website Hacking Roomba is a good start if you are searching for a way to move your Roomba through the serial interface. However, I found that for an introduction into robotics the available code is to advanced. Furthermore, it is my understanding that in order to learn something in robotics it is necessary to get the students to program/test/experiment code themselves. Thus, coding in Matlab is much more comprehensive than C/C++.

When searching for some Roomba code in Matlab you will certainly stumble over the Matlab Toolbox for the iRobot Create V2.0 . The toolbox is a nice start, but works, as specified, only with the iRobot Create V2.0. With the help of this code and the Manual for the serial communication interface provided by iRobot I was able to create a package that enables the robot to perform several simple tasks.