Pioneer 3™ Operations Manual

Accessories
For example, with MAIN POWER on, use joystick mode to position the robot onto the
charging platform. Then manually deploy the charging mechanism as described in the
section above. Thereafter, switch MAIN POWER off, or conversely, start up and shut down
other onboard systems, including the PC, camera, laser, and other accessories, to
proceed with development work without disturbing battery recharging.
The same conditions apply to remove charging power and retract the robot's charging
mechanism with the robot’s MAIN POWER on as well as off. Since the ARCOS controller
always is active while the robot’s power is on, you also may connect and disconnect a
client program, run in maintenance mode, or engage Joydrive mode. However,
engaging the motors, such as when you press the “fire” button on the joystick,
immediately and automatically disengages the charger and retracts the charging
mechanism. And the charging mechanism will not activate manually via the DEPLOY
CHARGER button until you disengage the motors.
RADIO CONTROLS AND ACCESSORIES
All MOBILEROBOTS platforms are servers in a client-server architecture. You supply the client
computer to run your intelligent mobile-robot applications. The client can be either an
onboard piggy-back laptop or embedded PC, or an off-board PC connected through
radio modems or wireless serial Ethernet. In all cases, that client PC must connect to the
internal HOST or User Control Panel SERIAL port in order for the robot and your software
to work.
For the piggyback laptop or embedded PC, that serial connection is via a common
“pass-through” serial cable. Radio modems may replace that serial cable with a wireless
tether. Accordingly, if you have radio modems, one is inside your robot and connected
to the controller’s HOST serial port, and the other modem plugs into a serial port on some
offboard computer where you run your client software. 10 Hence, in these configurations,
there is one dedicated client computer.
Figure 16. Client-server connection options.
Radio Ethernet is a little more complicated, but this preferred method because it lets you
use many different computers on the network to become the robot’s client. If you have
a PC onboard (either integrated or piggyback), it can supply the radio Ethernet
connection through a PCMCIA-based wireless Ethernet card.
We also sell a special wireless Ethernet-to-serial accessory which connects directly to your
robot’s controller. It works by automatically translating network-based Ethernet packet
communications into streaming serial for the robot controller and back again.
Running your robot through a wireless Ethernet to an onboard computer is different than
with the Ethernet-to-serial device. In the first case, you run your robot client software on
10 We no longer offer a radio modem accessory.
20