Electronic Platform for Small Robots in Education Raimund Edlinger #1 , Michael Zauner *2 , Walter Rokitansky *3 # FH OOE Forschungs & Entwicklungs GmbH Stelzhamerstr. 23, 4600 Wels, Austria 1 raimund.edlinger@fh-wels.at * FH OOE Studienbetriebs GmbH Stelzhamerstr. 23, 4600 Wels, Austria 2 michael.zauner@fh-wels.at 3 walter.rokitansky@fh-wels.at Abstract— Robotics is a scientific discipline which needs a high level knowledge in the fields of computer science, as well as electrical and mechanical engineering and high-performance modular control systems. This paper reports the first results of a project that uses a previously developed very small Electronic Platform (Miniboard) for small and simple autonomous mobile robots. This board is used in the education program with bachelor students in their third and fourth semester. It should help them to build robots, like Sumos or Line Followers, so they can get first experiences in robotic. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach in controlling indoor mobile robots for the RobotChallenge in Vienna. Keywords— wheeled mobile robots, WMR, controlling system, robotic hard and software architectures, RobotChallenge I. INTRODUCTION Robotics is a scientific discipline which needs a high level knowledge in the fields of computer science, as well as electrical and mechanical engineering and high-performance modular control systems. This paper reports the first results of a project that uses a previously developed very small Electronic Platform for small and simple autonomous mobile robots. Put simply, the Miniboard consists of a single- processor system which handles all tasks by itself. To easy the students the entrance into the robotic, a full driver library is supported, e.g. for ADC or Motor Control. In bigger robots, like Line Follower or Mega Sumos the Miniboard can be implemented, as well as in very small robots like the Mini or Micro Sumos. II. RELATED WORK Much of the recent work in robotics has used embedded systems such as PC 104 [9], Mini-ITX [8] or RNFBFRA- Board [7]. In contrast to the proposed concept, these systems are very big and have more computing power than needed for small robots. To control actuators or sensors, additional boards are often needed, this also increases the necessary space for the electronic. These are facts to complicate the design of robots for the students or make it impossible, e.g. if the board has bigger dimensions than the robot is allowed to have. III. HARDWARE DESIGN At the beginning of the development of the Miniboard (as shown in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) was one main point to design a board with dimensions fewer than 5 cm by 5 cm. Because one goal was to implement the board into Micro Sumo robots and these robots have a dimension of 5 cm by 5cm by 5 cm. On the board the micro controller ATMega644 [6] is used. Because this kind of micro controller is also used at the Modular Electronic System [1] and so the students get to know the ATMega644. The board is designed to be the stand alone control unit in a small robot. It can deal with:  up to two DC brushed motors  up to 14 digital Inputs/Outputs  up to four analogue Inputs Fig. 1 Miniboard Topview