Viam Rover 2.0
The Viam Rover is an affordable mobile robot that you can program to navigate autonomously. It serves as a practical introduction to prototyping with the Viam software platform, which offers SDKs and services like computer vision, motion planning, machine learning, and SLAM.
- Creator
- Year
- 2023
- Country
- United States 🇺🇸
- Categories
- Features
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Did you know?
The Viam website allows you to teleoperate a rover in the company's New York office.
History
Viam Robotics was founded in 2020 by Eliot Horowitz, the co-founder of MongoDB. Viam aims to build a robotics software platform that allows developers to create, configure, and control robots from anywhere, regardless of hardware or language. The platform would be capable of operating a wide range of systems, from industrial robots to autonomous vehicles to smart home appliances and IoT devices.
Horowitz, who was MongoDB's CTO from 2007 to 2020, says he created Viam to help robotics businesses get to market faster. Viam's platform is open source and focuses on simplifying the building, monitoring, and data management of robots and smart machines. Viam is headquartered in New York City.
Specs
- Overview
Model: Viam Rover 2.0. Pre-assembled kit. Works with single board computers, such as a Raspberry Pi (not included). Designed to be customizable to incorporate lidar and other hardware. Open source: BOM and CAD data on Github.
- Status
Ongoing
- Year
2023
- Website
- Width
- 23 cm
- Height
- 8 cm
- Length
- 30.5 cm
- Weight
- 1.5 kg
- Speed
- 0.7 km/h
- Sensors
720p camera with integrated microphone. Drive wheels with a single line encoder. MPU-6050 IMU device with 6-axis sensing. Power monitoring module (INA219) and low voltage cutoff electronics (XH-M609).
- Actuators
Brushed DC motors with gearbox. High friction drive wheels.
- Degrees of Freedom (DoF)
- 2 DoF
- Materials
Anodized aluminum sheet with pattern holes for mounting additional equipment such as lidar or robot arms. Electronics mounted onto a breakout PCB.
- Compute
Controlled with a Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer (not included). Other single board computers including Nvidia Jetson Orin/Orin Nano, OrangePi Zero 2, or Rock Pi S can be fitted to the PCB with some reconfiguring by the user.
- Software
Viam software platform. Based on a single binary that can be downloaded and run on the rover's single board computer in a Linux environment. The rover can be configured through a Web UI and users can use intuitive APIs to start writing code in their language of choice. The platform offers a range of services that include computer vision, motion planning, machine learning, and SLAM.
- Power
Four 18650 batteries or larger RC-type batteries. Includes 5V buck converter to power a single board computer.
- Cost
- US $99
