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