A fellow from Italy asked on the /ROS subreddit about an (Ackerman steering) mobile robot platform I had not seen, so I took a look at the ROSMaster R2 by Yahboom
This is a serious-about-robotics-education company, with an extremely impressive variety of platforms and tutorials from youth to university level. (117 video tutorials with Chinese and English subtitles). Albeit they are not serious enough about the quality of their English language documentation or their software release management. (Google drive downloads, with install instructions in Chinese.) They are seriously suffering from trying too hard to be in every corner of the market.
They have “WhatsApp Support Lines” open during China business hours staffed by English challenged staff, but folks report successful assistance in spite of the language difficulties.
I am not aware of anything equal to this offering by any other company world-wide.
If I was going to bite on a ROS 2 supported platform, I would go for the $659 (Pi5 not inc.) ROSMaster X3 “Standard RPi5” Mechanum wheeled robot. It would not be a smooth ride, but it does look far ahead of where I have reached with GoPi5Go-Dave.
Wow - that does look pretty amazing. But the Reddit review points out some significant red flags. The Yahboom site isn’t coming up for me - I’m using my personal laptop at work, so not sure if it’s the actual site or the work firewall.
/K
At first glance it seems incredibly impressive, but then reality kicks in:
Too complicated. Especially if the documentation and support is 9944/100% Chinese. Not that I have anything against Chinese, it’s just that Russian is hard enough already.
I’m still stumbling over the GoPiGo3. Getting one of those would be like my buying a 12 cylinder blown street-rod at 16 - it’s just too much robot for me to handle.
IMHO, in order for it to provide anything near the reported performance/capabilities, I’d need to buy one of the high-end NVIDIA boards to go with it - which would just about double the cost of the robot itself. Not to mention increasing the complexity as it would need an entirely different development environment to support the CUDA libraries, ROS, etc.
Did I mention the price? Maybe not at the level of a Create3 or Turtlebot, but it’s a big bite for me to chew - and the Russian import duties would be a significant percentage of the price.
It’s BIG, especially with the tower for the camera and the arm. And no, I don’t need a drug-sniffing bomb robot, despite living in Russia!
And did I mention the documentation? I bought an acrylic case for my JYE 'scope from them and the instructions for assembling it were completely confused - to the point that it was absolutely impossible to assemble it following the instructions they gave - unless you had four arms, prehensile feet, and a long tail to balance against.
And finally. . . . The hype itself was scary. Any time I see anything that appears to claim it walks on water, talks to the angels, and sits at The Right Hand of God - I’m suspicious of as the “over promise and under-deliver” meter vibrates against the upper stop.
It looks like Charlie and Charlene don’t have to worry about competition from a new Chinese robot any time soon.
No - the RPi5 they claim 1.5 hours and 1.0 hours for the Orin NX. They claim the RPi5 takes 10W and the OrinNX takes 10W | 20W. GoPi5Go-Dave is pulling about 10W total and gets 2 hours from his “3000mAh” Talentcell that is only delivering about 21WHr (with 15 min safety buffer) at this point in its life.
