Building your robot

Now you know how to make your own node and setup ROS, lets use this knowledge to build a basic robot

Note

Work in progress!

If you are reading this and June of 2025 has passed, then I probably am not going to finish this section ever β€” and now, this is your responsibility to complete. πŸ˜… If it is not then find me and motivate me to complete this section!

Here is an outline of what to do:

  • Learn about MicroROS and how to run it on ESP32, link to resources

  • Once that is done make the microcontroller subscribe to cmd_vel topic and using the values recieved from their actuate the motors.

  • Make the microcontroller publish the odometry of the robot to a topic (odometry: speed and distance of the robot), you will need a motor with encoder to achieve this.

  • Do this and the basic robot is done! now it’s time for some documentation, for that go and read this section

  • Done all this? Hooray! πŸ™Œ now you have a very fancy RC car you can play with.