Design of a multi-purpose low-cost mobile robot for research and education Sol Pedre 1 and Matas Nitsche 2 and Facundo Pessagc 2 and Javier Caccavelli 2 and Pablo De Crist´oforis 2 1 Centro At´ omico Bariloche, Comisi´ on Nacional de Energa At´ omica, Argentina. 2 Departamento de Computaci´ on, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. sol.pedre@cab.cnea.gov.ar, mnitsche@dc.uba.ar, fpessagc@dc.uba.ar, jcaccav@dc.uba.ar, pdecris@dc.uba.ar Abstract. Mobile robots are commonly used for research and educa- tion. Although there are several commercial mobile robots available for these tasks, these robots are costly and do not always meet the char- acteristics needed for certain applications, being very difficult to adapt because they have proprietary software and hardware. In this paper, we present the design ideas, development and applications of a mobile robot called ExaBot. Our main goal was to obtain a single multi-purpose low- cost robot -more than ten times cheaper than commercially available platforms- that can be used not only for research, but also for outreach and education activities. Its body, sensors, actuators, processing units and control board are well detailed. The software and printed circuit board developed for this project are open source to allow the robotics community to use and upgrade the current version. Finally, different configurations of the ExaBot are presented, showing several applications that fulfill the requirements this robotic platform was designed for. 1 Introduction Mobile robots can be found in many fields, ranging from missions in hostile environments for human beings (such as in space exploration), to home service robots (such as autonomous vacuum cleaners). To develop new applications, it is necessary to have test platforms. Thus, mobile robots are commonly used at re- search laboratories as well as universities. Nowadays, there are many commercial mobile robots available for this purpose. The most popular commercial research robots are those of Adept MobileR- obots and K-Team companies, in particular the Adept’s Pioneer [1] robots and K-Team Kheperas [2]. However, many times commercial robots do not quite fit the necessary characteristics and are difficult to adapt since they have propri- etary software and hardware. Moreover, a big drawback is their cost: the basic Pioneer 3-DX academic price is around $4,500, the basic Khepera III academic price is around $3,000 and the basic Koala II (also from K-Team) around $9,000. Extra sensors, processing elements or part replacements are also quite expensive.