Overview

This page lists what equipment you will need to supply in order to work with MIRO.

I am going to use a robot

If you are going to use a physical robot, rather than just the simulator, then you'll need to supply batteries which are not included. Four D-type NiMH cells are required, as well as a charger; the batteries must weigh at least 100g/cell. See Batteries for more details. You will also need to have access to some simple tools for Assembly.

I am a demonstrator

If you plan to use only the demonstrator capabilities of MIRO (i.e. you do not plan to develop your own control software), then all you will need is a MIRO robot and an Android device with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and that is capable of installing the MIROapp (that means Android Marshmallow 6.0 or later).

I am a developer

If you are a developer, you will need rather more equipment, as follows.

Workstation

Any MIRO development will require a workstation. We have chosen to explicitly support only Ubuntu Linux as the workstation operating system since that is the most commonly-used Linux system amongst developers. We directly support only version 16.04 LTS at this time (32- or 64-bit).

Other systems

Notwithstanding the above, you may be able to develop for MIRO using other operating systems—any Debian-derived system on which you can install ROS (Kinetic) and, if using the simulator, Gazebo (version 7.3 or later) ought to be alright (we use Linux Mint 18 on some of our machines).

Please let us know about your requirements, successes, and failures.

Simulation

If you plan to use the MIRO simulator, your workstation will have to be able to run ROS (Kinetic) & Gazebo (version 7.3 or later). In practice, that probably means at least a supported and sufficiently-powerful graphics card and a system on which Gazebo will successfully install and run (an up-to-date Ubuntu system will probably ensure the latter).

Physical

If you plan to work with a physical MIRO robot, you will still need a workstation equipped with ROS (Kinetic), but you will also need to supply batteries (see above). Additionally, you will need a local wireless network (WLAN or WiFi) and sufficient administrative access to it that you can get your MIRO connected. For some applications, you will also need to be able to configure a unique static IP address for each MIRO robot you are using simultaneously. You may find the MIROapp useful to make a first connection to your local network.