R2P: an Open Source Modular Architecture for Rapid Prototyping of Robotics Applications

Since many years, roboticists are working to bring robots in our everyday lives, but only few robotic applications have reached this market. Among the reasons for this are the high costs of design and prototyping of such innovative products. Looking at the steps needed to develop new robotic applications, we identified as a major problem the lack of tools and devices targeted to rapid robot prototyping. As a consequence, the resources, either time or money, that should be invested into the development of a new idea get drained by the building of a working prototype to eventually test the idea on. In this paper, we present R2P, an open source modular architecture for rapid prototyping of robotic applications, which aims at speeding up their development. R2P is an open source modular hardware and software architecture, where off-the-shelf basic modules (e.g., sensors, actuators, controllers) are combined together in a plug-and-play way, with tools for an easy development of control software, allowing the implementation of a complex system in a simple and standardized way. R2P allows people involved in robotics, from researchers and designers to students and hobbyists, to dramatically reduce the time and efforts required to build a robot prototype, leaving much more resources to the development of new robotic applications. In this paper, we describe R2P in its main components showing how it can really help in the development of a robot prototype.