The RoboRing at UCLouvain

Animated GIF

The RoboRing project

The RoboRing is an educational and research-development robotic platform at UCLouvain. The platform consists of a dozen Balboa 32U4 balancing robots, capable of self-balancing, navigating, and complete group tasks.

Resources

  • A dynamical model of the Balboa robots and a first laboratory experiment to gain familiarity can be found here. See also this Master's thesis

  • This software library can be used to implement local communication platform between robots

  • This repository implements a controller for self-balancing.

Functionalities

Image Each robot integrates a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (center) for processing, a Decawave DWM1001 (right) for localizartion, and an OLED screen (left)
Image Decawave DWM1001 used as anchor for localization
Self-balancing

Group balancing
Standup
Clock synchronization
Unicast communication

Brief description of the available modules

Each agent is based on the Balboa 32U4 self-balancing robot, developed by the company Pololu. It includes differential wheels, encoders, an IMU, magnetometer, and an ATMega32U4 MCU. It offers expansion features such as level shifters, GPIO extenders, etc. This robot serves as the basis for each agent in our swarm.

Each Balboa robot is coupled with a Raspberry Pi, forming an autonomous swarm agent. The Balboa is responsible for low-level operations such as motor control, LED signaling, button handling, and sensor access. In contrast, the Raspberry Pi handles high-level tasks including swarm communication, algorithm execution, and data logging.

The Decawave DWM1001-DEV system is used for localization. Each Decawave onboard module is composed of an UWB antenna, a microprocessor (Nordic nRF52832) and a J-Link allowing us to program the microprocessor.

Acknowledgments

Romain Englebert
Ms Student
2024-25

Giuseppe Speciale
Ms Student (UniBo)
2024-25

Aurélien Soenen
Ms Student
2023-24

François Wielant
Lab technician