For this project, ETH Zurich entrusted GR Lab with the development of Zephyr, an autonomous mobile base equipped with a robotic arm carrying a smartphone.
The goal is to automatically measure signal quality in indoor and outdoor environments while accurately recording the smartphone’s position. Zephyr is based on a Ranger Mini 3.0 platform with SLAM, autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, a graphical interface for mission planning and an HTTP API for integration with ETH Zurich’s research tools.
More broadly, we offer the PiPER robotic arm from AgileX Robotics as an option on our ROS 2 R&D bundles based on AgileX mobile platforms. This configuration combines mobile navigation and manipulation and enables rapid prototyping of complete mobile-manipulator robotics scenarios: object picking, interaction with the environment, advanced algorithm testing or automated measurement campaigns such as those carried out with Zephyr for ETH Zurich.