2 posts tagged with "viam"

This post is part of a series about the Autonomously Exploring Viam Rover (see my previous blog post). The rover is my attempt to build an inexpensive rover that is easy to assemble, so that anyone can replicate it. In this series, I'm showing how both the hardware and the software for the rover work.

This post in particular focuses on the control system of the rover, including motor control, sensor reading, and fusing data together to track the robot's position.

This project is about a low-cost robot that you can drop into a room, have it explore and map the entire space, then set navigating autonomously - all without GPS or lidar.

In this post, I walk through how I built an autonomous indoor mapping robot using the Viam Rover as a base, swapping out the webcam for an RealSense Depth Module D421 and using a Radxa X4 as the central compute (instead of the already-supported Raspberry Pi or Jetson Orin). The robot runs a full ROS 2 stack, including Visual SLAM for map building and Nav2 for autonomous navigation.

While building this robot out, I ran into some interesting challenges around encoder noise and calibration, which I cover in detail. If you want to build one yourself, there's a parts list at the bottom, and all the source code is on GitHub.