The Roomba Series - How to create an autonomous mobile robot

2 Minutes reading time

Maybe too much time

I found an outdated Roomba 581 vacuum robot in the attic. I just couldn’t throw it away, so I decided to pimp it a little.

A new hobby project was born!

Prototype: 300Release version: 300

After all, the Roomba hardware is a good vacuum, and it offers a serial interface to read sensors and control the actuators. Only the robot brain and navigation systems are really outdated. I decided to give it a new brain with better navigation hardware, and reuse the Roomba platform as a whole. Here are the ingredients:

  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as the new 64 bit brain running Ubuntu Linux

  • YDLiDAR X4 2D 360 degrees laser scanner

  • Small OLED display for better user interaction and feedback

  • MPU6050 6-DOF IMU to measure relative orientation, acceleration and velocity

  • HMC5883L magnetometer

  • Control software based on ROS (Robot Operating System)

What I am planning

There is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. After all the goal was to create a fully autonomous system, which is a quite complex task. So I am planning a series of postings here covering the following topics:

So stay tuned! I will link the posts here as soon as they are ready.

Git revision: 1e3fe2b

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