For years I have dreamed of building a personal robot that is "aware", and learns about its environment through wandering, mapping, collecting images for later classification and tagging through automatic and assisted dialog means.
WaLI will become this robot based on the ROS2 TurtleBot4 lite
Thanks for the link here Alan. Looking forward to following your progress. I needed to get a new 3D printer, so may be a while before I can invest in a new robot unfortunately.
/K
Oh, I’m jealous. I have been holding myself back not wanting to invest the time it takes to become proficient at creating the stl files, and the many retries it takes to learn how to make a successful part without a trail of learning prints. Also a factor, I don’t have any room to setup a print station for the few prints a year I would probably create.
As far as robots go, I’m discovering some significant ROS2 GoPiGo3 benefits in my new exploration of the TurtleBot4 lite.
The price has really dropped. And there are very reliable “Mini” printers. The Prusa Mini gets good reviews (Original Prusa MINI+ | Original Prusa 3D printers directly from Josef Prusa).
Simple modeling really isn’t that hard (I use the free hobbyist edition of Fusion 360) , and with improvements in the printers/slicing software the whole experience is becoming much more “straight out of the box” without a lot of tweaking.
/K
Looks good! I already have the lidar & rgb-d cameras and sbcs (Rasp Pi 4 & Nvidia Jetson) so went for the Create 3 but now have to get the lidar & camera mounted and get moving on this! Good luck and if anything ever ends up on github, please post a link on this topic.
I almost bought creality ender 3 pro on black friday, but UK prices seems doubled the deals elsewhere. Also, I seem to spend more time on non-robotic things rather than developing the robots I do have. Guess there is no stl for the tb4 lite camera and lidar mount so need to play a way ahead.
I will be interested to hear how your “home-built Turtlebot4lite” progresses.
well, I learned how to 3d print, bought a used one, made a camera and lidar holder, and mounted it on the create 3
next steps are image a raspberry pi (and later Jetson nano) and get it working with ROS2 and manage the power consumption of the 3d cameras.
I’ve ordered an extra wheel for the rear, so will 3d print a new cargo bay as I think the weight will be off balance otherwise.
Suggestion for the RPi imaging: Either base your system on the TurtleBot4lite RPi4 image or investigate that image. They configured the USB ports for high current, and will have tutorials that will be useful even if you have a different LIDAR driver, and 3D camera. They figured out some stuff I was not able to figure out on my own in Galactic.
I was also thinking that I would add a powerbank to run the Pi4, and a Pololu enable/disable power-buck to charge the powerbank when the Create3 is on the dock. The Create3 powering itself, the Pi4 doing heavy processing, powering the LIDAR, and the 3D camera only got a little more than an hour off the dock. If the Pi4 pulled a GPIO line attached to the Pololu power supply enable line when the Create3 was on the dock, it could charge the powerbank while the Create3 was charging the main battery. The recharge time is already pretty significant and would be a bit longer, but the off-dock time would be greatly improved. The other thing this solves is the Create3 does not jerk the power out from under the Pi4 when sent a ROS2 shutdown msg. (I did put an issue into iRobot to add a delay on the shutdown to allow the Pi4 to shutdown before the Create3 pulls the plug.)
Also, I would recommend mounting the Pi4 outside the cargo bay, not in it. The Turtlebot4lite has a tiny, tiny fan in the bay and it tries to keep the Pi4 cool, but I am pretty sure trying to push the Pi4 with mapping or 3D camera localization would need the Pi4 to be moved up to the top plate. (The Turtlebot4lite did not even put a tiny heatsink on the Pi4 - that I cannot understand the reasoning at all.)
Thanks for your help. I am redoing the camera and lidar holder so the lidar is absolutely on top (currently blocking it at +/- 45 degrees and 180). Will mount the raspberry pi outside on top with cooling fan from Amazon and MEGA4 - 4-Port USB from PiHut plus a 10000mah battery. Technically I could run multiple 3d cameras at the same time with that, but not sure of the use case. Have you experimented with SLAM & Nav2 yet? Wondering if I set a waypoint but a human happened to get in the way whether NAV2 can cope with that or if I need to roll up my sleeves. Will test that as soon as the parts arrive. Buck charger was something I am considering for another project (AgileX Limo) as I have a couple of Neato Botvac charging docks and it would benefit from docking.
Unfortunately I, and iRobot, were not able to find a configuration to keep the Create3 happy when running RTABmap and the Luxonis Oak-D ROS 2 node.
Wali was disassembled and is no longer wandering about my home.
