Greetings from the UK

' Afternoon folks,

I joined this forum at the end of November after watching one of Bill's DB1 Youtube videos. I was particularly interested when he mentioned developing a version using ROS on a Nano processor.

My initial interest in electronics was in designing and building Amateur Radio (ie. Ham (hate that term!))back in the '60s using things called valves, which ran very hot and used very high voltage levels. Transistors were almost unheard of back then. This lead to earning degrees in electronic engineering and a career in designing radio telephone, radars and electronic test equipment as well as working on the designs for the Shuttle Arm and a forerunner of the one installed on the ISS.

I have designed and built a number of robots over the years, ranging from simple obstacle avoidance ones to one which uses a Raspberry Pi and a number of Arduino cpus and which happily runs around the neigbourhood annoying many dogs but providing a good talking point with the dog's owners. A major disadvantage with this one was that, with a six wheel undercarriage, the skid steering tended to damage carpets and make a mess of wooden floors when run in the house so my wife banned it to the outside only.

I started another, smaller one with a circular base which again combines an RPi and Arduinos but designed for indoors use. Instead of the many geolocation sensors (principally GPS and compass as well as dead reckoning sensors in the wheels) collision avoidance and SLAM would be done with sonars. Possibly a LIDAR system will be installed in the future.

I had intended to use ROS on both of these systems but problems with ROS running on Ubuntu has caused a few headaches and the replacement of Unbuntu with Mint. I haven't had chance to test this latest change due to other commitments and work on this last robot has stalled for some time now but I hope to restart development shortly.

Regards from a cold and wet UK

Caliban