Rapid Prototyping for Control Education using Arduino and Open-Source Technologies

In this article, we introduce our recent development of small-sized experimental devices for control research and education, with a special focus on the use of open-source technologies such as Arduino and Processing. Arduino is a pronominal open-source hardware whose architecture, implementation and other necessary resources are accessible to every users, while Processing is its software counterpart which supports rapid development of controller/interface programs without much expertise. We demonstrate their advantage with a kinematic nonholonomic system called the trident snake robot and an under-actuated mechanical system called the inverted unicycle robot.