MARPY: a <$50 micro-ROS robot

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been building MARPY (Most Affordable ROS 2 Platform Yet), a small open-source robot aimed at people who want to learn ROS 2 with real hardware without dropping a few hundred dollars on a commercial platform. Total BOM lands around $50 USD, the rest is 3D printed.

There’s no extra computer on the robot. The ESP32 talks to your laptop directly over WiFi using micro-ROS. That’s where most of the savings come from, and it’s also the point: hardware is HARD, and beginners get to feel the things that tutorials usually skip, like WiFi lag, dropped messages, or noisy sensor readings. The robot also runs in Gazebo with the same launch files and topics, so you can try things in sim first and then see how they really behave on hardware.

On the sensing side it has hall encoders on both wheels for odometry, an MPU6050 IMU, and an optional ESP32-CAM that streams over HTTP and gets republished into ROS 2 as sensor_msgs/Image.

Workspace, docs, and sim are on GitHub.

Happy to answer questions in this thread.

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ROS News for the Week of May 4th, 2026
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I’m interested in this project to contribute

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Hi Vishal!
I’d be happy to have contributors on board. The most important things to add, as I see it for now, are:

  • Better electrical diagrams and assembly instructions. Most newcomers using this project are probably not very familiar with electronics. Even though I tried to keep the wiring as simple and basic as possible, improved wiring documentation would be very helpful.

  • A Kalman filter and PID gain tuning for the real hardware. I’m planning to add a small sensor fusion demo combining encoder and IMU data.

If you have other suggestions, feel free to open a PR. :slight_smile:

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Hi Tamirl!
It is too good for me also cause I’m a electronic guy, so I’ll do all the schematic, also have a theoretical knowledge of control(PID), I’m happy to contribute in this.

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? Battery appears minimal - Volts, mAhrs?
? Does the power supply support 5v 250ma for a LIDAR: (RPLidar C1 LIDAR)?
? How would you suggest I power an Oak-D-Lite Stereo Depth Camera? (5v 1A)
? 5GHz high bandwidth WiFi?
? How is clock sync’d - (major issue for mobile sensor platforms)
? How does it do running remote nav2 async SLAM and navigation?

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In this it is a small Battery but you can choose according to your motors.
You can run this lidar but not recommended using it direct instead use a converter.
You should go with a 20000mah Power bank cause it has inbuilt load regulation.
No in this we use ESP32 it is 2.4GHz.

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