Hi everyone!
I just created my account after reading some of the interesting tutorials and browsing the robots section. I don’t have any experience building robots but I would like to get started. Eventually I would like to have a robot that can map my backyard and identify objects. I would like it to identify key objects (orange cones for example) and plan a route to drive around them (like a track).
My plan is to start slowly and work my way up in complexity. I would like to start with a tracked or 4 wheel robot like the Lynxmotion or scout 4 wheel platforms and an Arduino . Are these platforms good options for me?
After construction, the first goal would be to simply program the robot to drive forward and backwards some short distance. I want to have encoders, can I add those to the 4 wheel scout robot? I will then add some infrared or ultrasound ranging sensors (front and back)? I would like to re-implement some of the algorithmic solutions to the SLAM problem (I think I’ll move to raspberry pi then). Eventually I want to add a camera for object detection and associate those with places on the map. I’ll maybe get a Lidar sensor if the other mapping is not sufficient. At this point I am only focusing on the chassis/actuators/encoders basics. Any advice you can offer me will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance, David.
Scout I referenced: