HELIOS Embedded System
Embedded hardware and software development of an autonomous cleaning robot for solar panels.
Why Embedded Development?
ART Robotics is developing HELIOS, an automated solar panel cleaning service. Our innovative system combines cleaning robots and a drone platform. The HELIOS Vehicle is an autonomous cleaning robot. After the first functional prototype V1.0 we developed a custom PCB and adapted our firmware architecture. Why did we focus on embedded development? Many reasons:
- Minimized size, weight and power consumption
- Easier integration within the vehicle
- Increased efficiency and robustness
Embedded Hardware
The HELIOS Vehicle PCB design covered the full process of:
- Requirements analysis
- High level schematic creation and simulation
- Component selection
- Detailed schematic creation in PCB CAD Software
- PCB layout design resulting in a 4 Layer mixed signal PCB
- PCB assembly
- PCB testing and debugging with oscilloscope and signal analyzers
Embedded Software
Some details of the firmware implementation:
- ESP32 Microcontroller running RTOS
- Object oriented firmware programming in C/C++
- Driver development for a variety of sensors (IMU, encoders, power monitoring, edge detection) and DC motors
- Internal communication protocols: I2C, SPI and UART
- Wi-Fi communication via MQTT with base station for CPU intensive tasks (computer vision, path planning)
