Prepare the Viam Rover for reliable autonomous navigation by installing its remaining software, calibrating the wheel encoders, and generating a motor lookup table. These steps give the control system more accurate movement data, ready for future mapping and navigation tasks.
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.
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.