SMALL AND COMPACT MOBILE ROBOTS SURVEYING AND COMPARING PLATFORMS

This article presents a survey on small and middle-sized compact mobile robotic platforms. Deciding beforehand which platform is adequate for tasks like search and rescue, change detection, surveillance or swarm robotics with one or more cooperative robots is a difficult challenge in the context of mobile robotics research. Several available mobile robots are compared and discussed in terms of physical dimensions, hardware, sensors, communication abilities, motion, autonomy and special features; providing assistance to the reader on the decision-making process of acquisition of a cost-effective robotic platform.