Remote control library and GUI development for Russian crawler robot Servosila Engineer

Abstract

Recently a large variety of robots are available on the global market for a reasonable price. Often it turns out that even though a robot has a high-quality hardware and architecture, an original software of the robot may have a number of drawbacks or lacks some important features, which are required for a particular application of the robot. In such cases a user may decide to implement new libraries and functionalities using a provided by a manufacturer application programming interfaces as in most cases code of a commercial robot system is not an open-source. A number of our ongoing research projects concentrate on applications of various robots in urban search and rescue operations, and in most of these projects utilize Russian crawler robot Servosila Engineer. This paper describes the development of a new ROS-based control software and graphical user interface for Servosila Engineer robot.