Jarvis: The DIY robot

It has been a while since i started to build an upgraded version of Dolly, my first DIY ROS based robot. This upgraded version is named Jarvis.

Changes from the previous version:

• Hardware:
  • The robot is now use tracks instead of wheels
  • Jarvis footprint is bigger and has more room to mount addition components
  • Jarvis uses NVIDIA Jetson Nano as high-level control board instead of Raspberry 3B (used in Dolly). The Jetson board has more GPU and processing power, and is suitable for machine learning stuffs (with the camera).
  • Jarvis uses step-down voltage regulator instead of step-up regulator (Dolly), the regulator provide more juice (up to 3A for each output)
  • 128 GB USB based SSD for operating system and storage instead of SD card
• Software:
  • Linux Ubuntu 20.04
  • ROS 2 is used instead of ROS (on Dolly)

As a work in progress, I'm now writing a booklet that detail the building process of the robot both on hardware and soft software (Arduino, ROS 2), as well as some application use cases. The initial plan is:

1. Introduction
2. Robot modeling and simulating with ROS 2 and Gazebo
3. Building the robot hardware step by step
4. Basic robot controlling software with ROS 2
5. Use case projects: such as localisation and mapping, autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance with machine learning, etc.

All further updates on the booklet can be found here: https://doc.iohub.dev/jarvis/.

Stay tunned!!!

Meet Dolly the robot

Ladies and gentlemen, please meet "Dolly the robot", the first version of my DIY mobile robot. My goal in this DIY project is to make a low-cost yet feature-rich ROS (Robot Operating System) based mobile robot that allow me to experiment my work on autonomous robot at home. To that end, Dolly is designed with all the basic features needed. To keep the bill of material as low as possible, i tried to recycle all of my spare hardware parts.

Specification

• Robot's chassis is 3D printed, the chassis's plate design is borrowed from the design of ** Turtlebot 3** which is a smart design, IMO. The other hardware parts, however, are completely different from the Turtlebot 3.
• IMU sensor with 9 DOF (accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope) for robot orientation measurement
• Two DC motors with magnetic encoders using as wheels and odometer
• Arduino Mega 2560 for low level control of the robot
• Raspberry PI 3B+ with embedded Linux for high level algorithm and network communication. The ROS middle-ware on top of the Linux system offers a powerful robotic software environment
• A 360 degree Neato LiDAR (laser scanner) up to 6 m range
• A 8 Mega pixel camera (Raspberry PI camera)
• Adafruit Motor shield V2 for motor controlling
• 10000 Mah battery
• ADS1115 analog sensor to measure and monitor battery usage
• 0.95" (128x64) mini OLED display
• The robot can be tele-operated using a bluetooth controller such as a PS4 controller

Applications

• Localization and mapping (SLAM)
• Obstacle avoidance
• Autonomous navigation
• Robot perception algorithms with LIDAR sensor and camera
• Much more...

Controlling a Turtlebot using PhaROS: Goals planning and Automatic docking

This is a demonstration of my current work on controlling robot using ROS and PhaROS. For that task, I've developed a dedicated PhaROS package that defines:

1. A base framework for ROS based visualization such as map, robot model, robot trajectory, etc.
2. An Event-driven API for robot controlling