DIY Robot: Bilibot robot platform with Kinect and ROSified computer

The creation of robots involves time and money but Bilibot Robot Platform with Kinect and a ROSified computer may just be a case otherwise. Creation of Garratt Gallaghe, a robotics engineer who is working now at MIT on the PR2 robot from Willow Garage, the Bilibot creates a robotics platform for making cheap and affordable robots. This project was started in late 2010, after the release of Microsoft’s Kinect. Bilibot is an open-source robot platform, having a base like iRobot Create, a Kinect sensor and a pre-installed with a cheap but powerful computer, which is pre-configured with Ubuntu and ROS.

bilibot robot

The main idea behind the Bilibot project's computer platform is using the existing cheap and best computer as the brain of this robot and thereby making it more affordable. Kinect sensor is used in Bilibot for receiving the commands while the Robot Operating System (ROS) is a framework for robot software development, which provides libraries and tools for creating robot applications. It also provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management and more.

The main difference between Bilibot and others is its cheap price. It is affordable and going to come for a mere price of $650, but is still having a standard robotics platform that researchers at major universities are using. One more difference is bundling a computer with the Bilibot, which ensures that you will have a working system right out of the box. Bilibot allows anyone with a small amount of programming experience to take advantage of the cutting edge technology to build their own robot as part of DYI experience.

The Bilibot robot can be used as a highly functional platform for your educational, research and hobby needs. You can build yourself this robot if you don’t want to pay a lot and you will get the plans and software to be used from Bilibot.

The basic reason for anyone to have Bilibot is that it is affordable and it includes cost of parts + charge for man hours. Its price is projected as $650, but it is subjected to variation when the final product will be released to market.

Via: Smashing Robots/IEEESpectrum