I am an engineer but I am new to robotics. I am working on an autonomous UGV (mostly off-road) but I need a proper controller. The UGV has two 3 kW AC motors with converters. It also have a stepper motor, a wireless camera and lidar is going to be mounted on it later.
I want you to recommend controllers that are suitable for this kind of work. Preferably that is open source,ROS compatible or with somewhat easy to use software. Price isnt much of an issue but I would appreciate if you give me a spectrum of controllers cheap and expensive.
The two considerations are “camera” and “lidar” and how much onboard processing you want to do.
Even an inexpensive microcontroller can handle the basic functions of the robot (drive motors, stepper controller, some basic sensors etc.).
If you plan to transmit the video feed and lidar data to be processed “off robot”, then you don’t need anything too special.
However, the more onboard processing you want to do, the more powerful it needs to be.
Current hobby standard boards are Arduino (many models) and Rasberry Pi (many models). https://www.robotshop.com/en/single-board-computers.html https://www.robotshop.com/en/arduino-microcontroller.html
