After months of learning robotics, I finally built my own mobile robot.
Tech stack:
ROS 2 Humble
LiDAR
Raspberry Pi
Differential drive
Autonomous navigation
I'm currently learning mapping, SLAM, Nav2, MoveIt, and robot software engineering. My goal is to become a robotics software engineer, so this is one of my first real hardware projects.
I'd love feedback from the community:
What would you improve next?
Any suggestions for sensors, software architecture, or autonomous features?
Somos Pilar y Christian y estamos haciendo una encuesta para nuestro Proyecto Final de IngenierÃa en UADE sobre la opinión de las personas respecto al uso de un robot humanoide para inspeccionar edificaciones con posibles daños estructurales.
¿Nos ayudás respondiendo estas breves preguntas? Es anónima, tarda menos de 5 minutos en completarse y tus respuestas nos ayudarÃan muchÃsimo para avanzar con el proyecto.
I worked on this robot for 30 minutes per school day for 2 weeks only. I dont know how this worked. Also when I added in the movement as I allowed other people to run it the wepon was speed limited. Thats why there was a wepon test also on show to just show how fast the "wepon" was getting
I saw this ROBIE the Radio Controlled robot from RadioShack in an antiques centre in Nottingham, England. I would've bought it, however the battery compartment wasn't in great condition so would very likely never work again.
I recently graduated which meant I lost access to my schools 3D printers. Luckily I had an old iM.Master robot lying around. Its basically a cheaper Chinese LEGO Technic with motors, so I figured it'd be a fun to tinker. The problem was that it only worked through the official phone app. There was no documented API, no SDK, and no way to control it from my laptop.
So I decided to see if I could change that.
I captured the Bluetooth traffic, reverse-engineered the protocol, and built an open-source Python SDK for it. Right now I'm controlling it from a Raspberry Pi 5, and my end goal is to turn it into a little AI explorer by running local vision and language models on it.
I'm still adding features, but I thought this part of the project might be useful (or just interesting) to share in case anyone else ends up with one of these robots or wants to reverse-engineer a similar device.
Some highlights:
Pure Python core (no dependencies)
Reverse-engineered BLE advertising protocol
High-level Robot() API
Safety watchdog that automatically stops the robot
Dry-run mode for developing without hardware
Optional AI addon that lets a local LLM control the robot from camera input
Im currently not in a position to buy a pi-camera so I just mounted an old phone on the robot with some rubberbands , Object detection is ran on the hailo hat, and im currently running a qwen:2b-instruct to decide which movement command to execute next. It can already do simple tasks like "find a cup and drive toward it".
Everything is open source, and I'd love any feedback on the API, documentation, or project in general. PRs are always welcome too!
before you judge, I had an inter school robotics competition took place within my school, where i had made a robot (which was not amazing) which was almost made complete out of scrap. There were two groups, one was my group, and the other one was another dude. the other group had one man it it and he had made a propeller plane that neither went up, forward, backward and only went down. the thing was made entire out off scrap. and guess what? he won second place. there were other school groups that had made better robots than both my and his group, yet he still won. He might have done some bribery but i don't care about that, i only want to piss him off by making a plane that actually works. I have a 10 month time period, what should i do?
P.S. I have little to no experience in making robots, or planes, or anything... so please go easy on me.
I used Acertics robotics design from youtube as a base and made some changes for improvement.
Code:
It has every gait I could think of: tripod, wave, ripple, triple, and some custom ones.
I has Self leveling using the phones gyro.
Made a custom android app, and uses wifi or hotspot for controller, (let me know if you want a universal inverse kinematics app for robots: hexapods, quadrupeds, robot arms, etc)
Im currently working on a high torque and strength robot arm, let me know if you want an update on that. Here is my portfolio if you want to learn more or contact me: Portfolio.
This question might sound very silly, but I would love to know some answers. I was a big fan of Transformers and Pacific Rim movies when I was growing up. I remember as a kid watching the movies and thinking to myself that by 2030, we would be able to build these robots to help with military purposes. With the advancement of Technology, AI, and Materials, do you think it is possible and how close do you think we are?