Micipsa - ROS2 Jazzy Autonomous Mobile Robot

<p>Hi,</p> <p>I’ve been working in my free time on a side project called <a href="https://micipsa.netlify.app" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa</a>, a 4-wheel autonomous mobile robot meant to serve as an educational or prototype base robot.</p> <div class="d-image-grid"> <p></p><div class="lightbox-wrapper"><a class="lightbox" href="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/original/3X/7/7/77472968d325cb695ffe3e67d2d2b387e16194a2.jpeg" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="micipsa_front"><img alt="micipsa_front" height="381" src="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/optimized/3X/7/7/77472968d325cb695ffe3e67d2d2b387e16194a2_2_690x381.jpeg" width="690" /></a></div><p></p> <p></p><div class="lightbox-wrapper"><a class="lightbox" href="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/original/3X/5/0/5016d6b1b3017263c38a160bd6db70e9ed313414.jpeg" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="micipsa_back"><img alt="micipsa_back" height="362" src="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/optimized/3X/5/0/5016d6b1b3017263c38a160bd6db70e9ed313414_2_690x362.jpeg" width="690" /></a></div><p></p> <p></p><div class="lightbox-wrapper"><a class="lightbox" href="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/original/3X/4/c/4c89d183ecf898a5b2b9d0ae062c0940de29ed33.jpeg" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="micipsa_isometric"><img alt="micipsa_isometric" height="414" src="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/optimized/3X/4/c/4c89d183ecf898a5b2b9d0ae062c0940de29ed33_2_689x414.jpeg" width="689" /></a></div><p></p> </div> <p>It is designed to be both affordable and easy to work with, whether you’re a student, hobbyist, engineer, or researcher. <strong>The project focuses on providing a seamless developer experience by minimizing the effort/friction required to set up, configure, operate, deploy, and debug the robot</strong>.</p> <p>Micipsa focuses on having a strong foundation built on <strong>good software and system practices</strong>. It’s <strong>designed for modularity</strong>, so you can easily edit, remove, or add any software layer, and change or add hardware components with minimal changes required elsewhere in the system.</p> <div class="d-image-grid"> <p></p><div class="lightbox-wrapper"><a class="lightbox" href="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/original/3X/f/d/fd1ae8293e3049054a9cdd9e0362775b4b5ae2d2.jpeg" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="layers"><img alt="layers" height="500" src="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/optimized/3X/f/d/fd1ae8293e3049054a9cdd9e0362775b4b5ae2d2_2_540x500.jpeg" width="540" /></a></div><p></p> <p></p><div class="lightbox-wrapper"><a class="lightbox" href="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/original/3X/d/5/d547c3905b2ae5f517d66dd36b7724141bb9b100.png" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="launch_options"><img alt="launch_options" height="500" src="https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/uploads/ros/optimized/3X/d/5/d547c3905b2ae5f517d66dd36b7724141bb9b100_2_444x500.png" width="444" /></a></div><p></p> </div> <p><strong>The primary goal of Micipsa</strong> is not to provide a robot with the most advanced navigation, localization, or perception capabilities out of the box, but to offer a robust and well-designed foundation that can be easily tuned, extended, and upgraded to achieve the level of performance you need for your application.</p> <p>This allows developers to focus on the software layer that interests them most whether localization, navigation, or actuation by tuning or replacing the default implementation with their own.</p> <p>A few example videos are shown below, with additional examples available on Micipsa documentation homepage</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1fUdyNEVrQ" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Obstacle Avoidance - Real Robot</a><br /> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jYB1SpGsOA" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Actuation - Real Robot</a><br /> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvaTOFdDn0E" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Behavior Tree - Simulation</a><br /> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Eja58mlFI" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Pointcloud Processing - Simulation</a></p> <h1><a class="anchor" href="https://discourse.openrobotics.org#p-117329-why-1" name="p-117329-why-1"></a><strong>Why?</strong></h1> <p>The reason I started this project is because open-source robotics in generals has plenty of projects, of many different types and capabilities but most of them fall short on clear, well-structured, top-down documentation that makes it easy to understand the system, edit it, add features, or onboard new people of different levels. Documentation tends to be heavy to digest, not structured, opaque/lack of information or more recently only bullet points.</p> <p>On top of that, many of educational robotics projects try to be compatible with everything and do everything, built on a brittle foundation that skips good software and system practices. The result is a system cluttered with unused conditional variables, parameters, and launch files, duplicate variables/params and so on. Noise that makes changes or new features expensive, difficult, or sometimes simply not possible.</p> <h1><a class="anchor" href="https://discourse.openrobotics.org#p-117329-funding-2" name="p-117329-funding-2"></a><strong>Funding</strong></h1> <p>Depending on how this project is received, I might launch a Kickstarter (or similar) to fund it or even start a company and work on it full-time.</p> <p>Most of the hardware components used in this project were chosen based on what was available to me at the time. In the future, I’d like to reassess these choices and select the components that are best suited to the project’s goals and requirements.</p> <p>In the long term, the vision is to apply the same philosophy across a wide range of robotic platforms, from robotic arms and drones to bipedal and humanoid robots.</p> <p><strong>What’s next?</strong></p> <p>Some of what I’m planning for V2:</p> <ul> <li>Custom microcontroller firmware, following the same design principles</li> <li>Cable management</li> <li>A user interface for testing, configuration, and mission deployment</li> <li>An improved 3D model for easier printing and less post-processing</li> <li>A UI for setup scripting</li> <li>Remote access from a different location</li> <li>A dedicated charging base</li> <li>Step-by-step build tutorials, plus guides for specific cases (adding components, writing launch files to the Micipsa standard, replacing/adding a layer, hardware calibration, building your own Docker container, etc.)</li> <li>A debugging roadmap organized by problem type</li> <li>Test scripts to automate testing and validate results for each layer of the robot</li> <li>Taking more advantage of ROS2 Lifecycle nodes</li> <li>SDK ?</li> <li>AI Version</li> </ul> <h2><a class="anchor" href="https://discourse.openrobotics.org#p-117329-feedback-wanted-3" name="p-117329-feedback-wanted-3"></a>Feedback wanted</h2> <p>Whether positive or negative, I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts on the project, the documentation, hardware or anything you think could be improved or added.</p> <p>If you have a few minutes, I’d also really appreciate it if you could answer <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKkU8UYRPGeG4QpY8ZfwmSmhtOtIeOL6m3NMP-8V7r5Srkug/viewform?usp=publish-editor" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Survey</a> questions. Your feedback would help me a lot.</p> <p><strong>Documentation</strong>: <a href="https://micipsa.netlify.app" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa</a><br /> <strong>GitHub:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/Dyris-Robotics/micipsa" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Micipsa Github</a> (Coming soon final touches for V1 are currently being made)</p> <p>Please keep in mind that the documentation is not yet 100% complete, and I still need to properly credit some of the modules and projects that Micipsa builds upon, such as Nav2, ros2_control, and others.</p> <p><strong>Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for any feedback you can share!</strong></p> <p><small>1 post - 1 participant</small></p> <p><a href="https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/micipsa-ros2-jazzy-autonomous-mobile-robot/57702">Read full topic</a></p>