Designing a Modular Robotics Platform: An Agile Multi-Disciplinary Systems Engineering Approach

Robotics is an ever growing market, to put things in perspective, the worldwide market for both industrial and service robots is forecast by the IFR to exceed the $66 Billion by 2025. Numerous breakthroughs have been achieved thanks to robotics research, in all walks of life, the 3d printing boom, space exploration, unprecedented production efficiency and last but not least the entertainment industry. Locally the attempts to delve into this lucrative and promising field is still hindered by a tendency to be on the consumer side, even in the more ambitious projects we haven't moved away from ready made concepts. Hence, it makes financial and even common sense to be pursuing an endeavor in areas this promising. Faced with the sheer vastness of the field, and a poignant fragmentation and lack of standardization of both hardware and software components, we have set out to develop our own modular, reusable robotics platform. In this book, we detail the agile system design process we adopted and attempted to remold, and go over the different phases of building our platform up to the manufacturing of the first prototypes.

Issam Smaali, M.Sc, Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Systems Design engineer at Himilco,SA since June 2015.