The PlatypusBot is a TurtleBot3-inspired robotic constructed from vacuum cleaner components

All of us love the immense comfort supplied by robotic vacuum cleaners, however what occurs after they get too previous to perform? Fairly than throwing it away, Milos Rasic from element14 Presents wished to extract the often-expensive elements and repurpose them into a wholly new robotic, impressed by the TurtleBot3: the PlatypusBot.

Rasic shortly started working by disassembling the bot into its drive motors, pump, and a number of other different small components. Fortunately, the primary drive motors already had built-in encoders which made it very simple to attach them to an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and an L298N motor driver for exact positional information/management. Additional bettering the granularity, Rasic added a 360-degree lidar module and sufficient area for a Raspberry Pi so as to run SLAM algorithms sooner or later.

For now, this 3D-printed robotic assembled from reclaimed robotic components is managed by way of a joystick over UDP and Wi-Fi. The host PC converts the joystick’s places right into a vector for the motors to observe, after which the values are despatched to the UNO R4 WiFi for processing.

For extra particulars on this undertaking, you possibly can learn Rasic’s element14 weblog submit.