My robot RADU is a two wheeled robot that combines custom hardware for the sensor and motor, a Raspberry Pico and L293D motor shield, and a purchasable robotic arm that is controlled via a Raspberry Pi shield. For both parts of the robot, I want to use the same control…

After finally dropping ROS from the software stack, I continued with my robot build essentially where I left off half a year ago: A two wheeled, Raspberry Pico controlled vehicle that listens to commands via a Gamepad that are translated to movements messages. Then, I rebuild the robot, added the…

A mobile robot offers many interfaces for controlling. In my project RADU, a two-wheel movable robot, I implemented a wrap for movements commands from the Robot Operating System ROS. Commands have two parts in which we are interested: The linear velocity in meter/second, which moves the robot along its x-axis…

When using the Robot Operating System, nodes are started, topics published, messages send. Internally, the ROS nodes use these messages to communicate with each other. …

Building a robot is a unique project with several design decisions. Starting from the general chassis, sensors, actuators and visuals down to the concrete microcontroller, libraries and programming languages. Specifically, the later encompasses Arduino, Teensy, ESP32, Raspberry Pico and C, C++, Python, MicroPython and Lua. This article presents a compact…

In the last article, I explained the various visual sensors that you can equip on your robot. After comparing the various sensors, I decided to use the Intel Realsense D435 camera. …

The robot operating system ROS is the most widely used robotic middleware platform. It’s being used in the robotics community for more than 10 years, both in the hobbyist area as in industry. …

Equipped with visual sensors, a robot can create a map of its surroundings. Combining camera images, points cloud and laser scans, an abstract map can be created. Then, this map can be used to localize the robot. Combining both aspects at the same time is called SLAM — Simultaneous Localization…

Building a moving robot will typically lead to adding visual sensors that enable the robot to inspect its surroundings and navigate. Visual sensors encompass ultrasonic sensors or laser scanners for distance measurements, LIDAR for a 360-degree laser scan image, cameras that provide RGB images, and sensors that provide complex point…