Initial Course Explanation

Purchase MIKRIK Robot Chassis

Glad to notify, that my robot became available on Tindie. If you are not willing to follow all setup steps and just want a ready-to-run robot for your ROS2 adventures, please support me here.

Met an issue? Please join my Slack channel or leave comments below the post.

I decided to find a way to make life of a typical x86 ROS-maker easier. For Intel-based processors I found on the web a Robotics SDK. Literally, it is a set of debian packages that you install on your Ubuntu 22.04 system, and can access Intel-proprietary 3D-vision algorithms like CollabSLAM, ADBSCAN, KudanSLAM. I decided to give it a try, and that is how my new robot project got born.

MIKRIK - is an open-source two-wheel drive robot for robotic enthusiasts who is studying robot vision using 3D-cameras.

Abbreviation of the MIKRIK:

• MIni
• Kreative
• Robotics
• Intellective
• Kit

Project has two parts:

- Robot Part. It runs ROS1 using Raspberry PI 4B. ROS1 has nodes to communicate with the robot motors and to read encoder data. There we will run roscore ROS1 master. Then it creates a robot controller, after that your robot can be controlled by /cmd_vel topic. To go further, you will have to connect it to the client part of the project, and control robot by sending control commands to the /cmd_vel topic.

- Control Computer Part. It is the main brain of the robot. It will generate control commands, and move robot according to the main navigation node program. It can be any powerful enough computer running ROS2 ROS1 SLAM and navigation nodes. Navigaton node will subscribe to the /cmd_vel topic and will publish value to your robot using ROS1-ROS2 bridge.

Your robot can run ROS2 on Intel NUC, powered by x86 Intel CPU board like LattePanda, Radxa X4, or UP7000 board. Because they are all x86, the setup will be identical for all of them. The only thing, maybe some of the boards will require external Wi-Fi module.

Why do I need to use ROS1-ROS2 bridge?

Raspberry is not powerful enough to handle vision part, and Robotics SDK is not supported on ARM architecture. For MIKRIK project it is used only for the low-cost tasks. The high-load computer vision tasks, SLAM, and navigation will be done by a separate board. In my case I will use x86 board LattePanda.

In the end of the tutorial you will know:

• How to build a differential drive two-wheel robot i.e. Robot Part. By finishing that part you will have a ROS1 robot to be controlled using a PS4 gamepad.

There might be a slight discrepancy between photos and actual CAD-parts that you have. Project is in the development stage, so CAD-files are getting updated often.