Create Your Own Robot Kit#

This tutorial describes how to create an autonomous mobile robot capable of exploring and mapping an area by adding the an Intel® compute system, adding a Intel® RealSense™ camera on top of any robot base, and using the Edge Insights for Autonomous Mobile Robots software.

You can use one of these teleop methods to validate that the robot kit hardware setup was done correctly.

Hardware Requirements#

The robot base should contain:

  • Intel® compute system with Edge Insights for Autonomous Mobile Robots installed

  • Intel® RealSense™ camera

  • Robot base support (chassis) for the Intel® compute system and the Intel® RealSense™ camera

  • Wheels

  • Motor

  • Motor controller

  • Batteries for all components

Software Requirements#

The robot base should have a ROS 2 node capable of:

  • Publishing information from the motor controller firmware into ROS 2 topics like wheel odometry

  • Getting information from other ROS 2 nodes and transmitting this data to the motor controller firmware, for example, receiving movement commands from ROS 2 Navigation 2 stack on the cmd_vel topic

  • Providing robot specific information like the tf tree data with correct tf transformations, for example, odom and base_link and their transformations

  • When using multiple robots, it is useful to be able to change these names for each robot like robot1_odom and robot1_base_link (more information can be found here)

Note

This ROS 2 node runs on the compute system and gets information from the motor robot controller via a wire connection, usually a USB connection.