Autonomous navigation with Jackal robot

In this project, me and my colleagues from work want to program our Jackal robot (a very nice platform from Clearpath Robotics) to do autonomous tasks. The idea is that the robot can serve as companion, communicate with people and execute small tasks like bringing a coffee, carry some things, etc.

Recently, we just succeeded  in making the robot navigate autonomously including obstacle avoidance. Check out the video below to see what came out.

Next, we are going to implement autonomous exploration to completely map our office, equip the robot with more sensors and work on human interaction with the robot. Stay tuned for more!

My first IoT robot

Recently, I just built my first robot from scratch and I am very happy with the result.

The robot is powered by servo motors and has the following features:

• 5DOF robot, actually 4 if we exclude the gripper

• the brain is an Arduino Yun with IoT capabilities

• the control interface is built in Blynk app

• forward kinematic are implemented in Matlab using the Robotics Toolbox

• a new library that I wrote which realizes a smooth motion

If you are interested on how to build it, please check out my description on the Arduino project hub.