Grob: a low cost ROS robot

Description

This project is design to help to start with ROS (Robot Operating System) to leverage the knowledge of the robotics community easily. Most of ROS experiences need a high price robot or is limited to playing on simulation only.

The main idea is to use low cost components (one RPI 2/3 and 30 €/$) to build an autonomous robot and focus on the software (ROS) part.
I hope it will help makers to start experimenting with ROS and bring a lot more robots on earth.

The brain of the robot is a Raspberry pi 2 for ROS execution with an Arduino for real time tasks.
The robot is designed with three floor:
-The lower one: power and motors,
-The middle one: low level command (Arduino and H-bridges),
-The higher one: raspberry pi and camera.
Some sensors will be added (as ultrasound and infrared range sensors).
It is an ongoing project with iterative design and should change a lot.

Project licence is BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution License)

Details

This project is organised as follows:

Setup:

Step 1 : Fresh install of raspbian

Step 2 : Installation of ROS on Raspbian

Step 3 : Catkin workspace and tutorials

Build steps:

-base

Low level API:

-motors
-camera
-sonar

Control the robot:

...

Components

1 × SD Card (8 Gb or more) (7 €) For step 1

1 × Raspberry pi 2/3 (40 €) For Step 2

1 × USB WiFi dongle (or not if RPI3) For Step 2

1 × Arduino Uno (clone 5.5 €) For Step 3

Project Logs

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Step 3 : Catkin workspace and tutorials
David Galdeano • 05/09/2016 at 07:50 • 0 comments

...
Step 1 : Fresh install of Raspbian
David Galdeano • 02/29/2016 at 10:20 • 1 comment

The creation of a new robot start by setting up the needed tools.
In this step we will install a fresh Raspbian OS (from windows OS).
If you already have a SD card with Raspbian, you can go to Step 2.
1 - Download Raspbian
Download Raspbian :
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
Click on the "Download ZIP" button of the Full desktop image.
Extract the image file from the archive.

2 - Format the SD card
Download SD Formatter 4.0 :
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
Install it.
Insert your SD card on the computer
In SD Formatter 4.0,
- select your SD card,
- in option, set FORMAT SIZE ADJUSTMENT to ON,
- click format.
3 - Write the Raspbian OS on the SD card
Download Win32DiskImager :
https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
Install it.
In Win32 Disk Imager
- select the Raspbian image file downloaded earlier,
- select the right device,
- click "Write" button and wait,
- eject the sd card.

View all 2 project logs

Discussions

Thomas wrote 02/11/2018 at 07:13

Somehow it's even more interesting to make ROS work with a very cheap robot (modeling probability for cheap sensors, shaky movement). Some of the work can go into making the performance of cheap drives and sensors better :-) I like the radical low cost approach!

Are you sure? yes | no

David Galdeano wrote 02/12/2018 at 09:19

Thanks for the comment. I did a lot of improvement and I should take the time to download them but I have a busy schedule.

Are you sure? yes | no

David Galdeano wrote 02/29/2016 at 11:37

As I am a non-native English speaker, feel free to correct any mistakes.

Are you sure? yes | no

Grob: a low cost ROS robot

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