Two days ago VECTOR was a homemade mecanum rover with a Jetson Orin Nano and no brain. Today it explored my workshop on its own.
What I did, step by step:
– wrote a dimOS blueprint for it (
@dimensionalos open source robot OS), so their cockpit, 3D viewer and nav stack run on it out of the box
– first real motion on day one, on blocks first, then on the floor. Wheel encoders match the tape measure
– a watchdog: if the software dies, the wheels stop in under 2 s
– could not find the lidar serial board adapter in my mess, so it goes through an ESP32 board used as a plain USB adapter
– lidar odometry (KISS-ICP) + RealSense depth fused into a 3D voxel map, then a costmap
– today: frontier exploration with dimOS's own planner. It picks where to go, drives there, maps, repeats
Not there yet: it bumps into table legs and the sofa (I'll add bumpers switches) and when it gets stuck it doesn't know how to back off. That's next.
Everything is in the open:
github.com/metrox-eth/vector…