TurtleBot is the most popular open source robot for education and research. The new generation TurtleBot3 is a small, low cost, fully programmable, ROS based mobile robot. It is intended to be used for education, research, hobby and product prototyping.
TurtleBot was developed to meet the cost-conscious needs of schools, laboratories and companies. TurtleBot3 is the most affordable robot among the SLAM-able mobile robots equipped with a 360° Laser Distance Sensor LDS-01.
The dimension of TurtleBot3 Burger is only 138mm x 178mm x 192mm (L x W x H). Its size is about 1/4 of the size of the predecessor. Imagine keeping TurtleBot3 in your backpack and develop your program and test it anywhere you go.
The TurtleBot brand is managed by Open Robotics, which develops and maintains ROS. Nowadays, ROS has become the go-to platform for all the roboticists around the world. TurtleBot can be integrated with existing ROS-based robot components, but TurtleBot3 can be an affordable platform for whom want to get started learning ROS.
TurtleBot3 encourages users to customize its mechanical structure with some alternative options: open source embedded board (as a control board), computer and sensors. TurtleBot3 Burger is a two-wheeled differential drive type platform but it is able to be structurally and mechanically customized in many ways: Cars, Bikes, Trailers and so on. Extend your ideas beyond imagination with various SBC, sensors and motors on a scalable structure.
TurtleBot3 is able to get a precise spatial data by using 2 DYNAMIXELs in the wheel joints. DYNAMIXEL XM series can be operated by one of 6 operating modes(XL series: 4 operating modes): Velocity control mode for wheels, Torque control mode or Position control mode for joint, etc. DYNAMIXEL can be used even to make a mobile manipulator which is light but can be precisely controlled with velocity, torque and position control. DYNAMIXEL is a core component that makes TurtleBot3 perfect. It is easy to assemble, maintain, replace and reconfigure.
The control board is open-sourced in hardware wise and in software wise for ROS communication. The open source control board OpenCR1.0 is powerful enough to control not only DYNAMIXELs but also ROBOTIS sensors that are frequently being used for basic recognition tasks in cost effective way. Various sensors such as Touch sensor, Infrared sensor, Color sensor and a handful more are available. The OpenCR1.0 has an IMU sensor inside the board so that it can enhance precise control for countless applications. The board has 3.3V, 5V, 12V power supplies to reinforce the available computer device lineups.
TurtleBot3 Burger uses enhanced 360° LiDAR, 9-Axis Inertial Measurement Unit and precise encoder for your research and development. TurtleBot3 Waffle is equipped with an identical 360° LiDAR as well but additionally proposes a powerful Intel® RealSense™ with the recognition SDK. TurtleBot3 Waffle Pi uses high utilized Raspberry Pi Camera. This will be the best hardware solution for making a mobile robot.
The hardware, firmware and software of TurtleBot3 are open source which means that users are welcomed to download, modify and share source codes. All components of TurtleBot3 are manufactured with injection molded plastic to achieve low cost, however, the 3D CAD data is also available for 3D printing. The 3D CAD data is released via Onshape which is a full-cloud 3D CAD editor. Users can get an access with a web browser on desktop PC, laptop and even portable devices. Onshape allows to draw 3D models and to assemble them with colleagues. Besides, for the users who want to make OpenCR1.0 board by themselves, all details of the OpenCR1.0 board such as schematics, PCB gerber files, BOM and firmware source code are fully opened under the open-source licenses for users and ROS community. You can modify downloaded source code and hardware to share it with your friends.