Congratulations to maker Greg Flurry on his prize-winning autonomous Raspberry Pi rover. It's totally portable and uses a variety of sensors for independent navigation.
The rover has three main abilities: localization to find its current location, navigation to determine an optimal path to travel and locomotion, which moves the rover along a predetermined path.
The robot relies on a Raspberry Pi 3 B as the main board. Flurry said he picked this model because it much less power hungry than the Raspberry Pi 4, yet is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Zero.
Making the rover mobile is a 6000 mAh battery. Meanwhile, the chassis comes from a customized Scout Robot Chassis kit from ServoCity.
Flurry entered the autonomous rover in the official 2020 Robot Contest for Instructables, and it won, scoring the maker the first-place prize, a $500 Amazon gift card.
A lot of work and hardware went into this project, but the payoff was absolutely worth it. If you'd like to read more about the project, it's assembly and how it operates, check out the complete project breakdown on Instructables.
