I want to test analytics software I’m developing on a wide variety of movements and ROS2 frameworks (e.g. MoveIt, Nav2, etc.) and sensor types, and I’m looking for recommendations on robots that are a good balance between low cost and a broad range of functionality. For example, I’m thinking of a combination of a Turtlebot 4 for a mobile robot and a Waveshare RoArm M3 for a robot arm with some Gen AI capabilities. I’m sure a lot of people have experience with the Turtlebot here but I’m curious what your recommendations would be in general.
By the way, I’m new here and wasn’t sure what category to post this in. Please let me know if there’s a better place for this discussion. Thanks in advance.
Hi @kristoph_robotforest I’m building Research/EDU ROS2 first, diff drive robot, has 2 Lerobot Arms, pan/tilt camera with Realsense and runs on Jetson/RPi 5.
It can do Nav2 with Lidar, and currently I’m researching vision only navigation with Isaac ROS.
I also had TB4/Create, 3 but I wanted to hack it more than what platform allowed, so I built my own. (also iRobot filled for bankruptcy so TB4/Create3’s future is pretty unclear)
I’m still exploring that, but primarily looking at warehouse applications like AMRs and robot arm pickers (hence the desire to test out Nav2 and Moveit2 frameworks). Obviously the production grade robots in this space are at a much higher price point, but I’m looking for some good development-stage robots before graduating to those.
I remember of this one https://www.pedrobot.com/ as being really low cost if you “just need a small arm to test something or make some research”. Maybe it helps…
