Sensor Mapping Robot

This is my 3rd Year MEng Individual Project at the University of Manchester, supervised by Dr. Frank Podd.

The project integrates RPLIDAR A1, Raspberry Pi 4, Arduino motor control, and ROS Noetic with Hector SLAM to achieve real-time indoor mapping and robot navigation.

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🔑 Features

• Real-time Hector SLAM mapping using RPLIDAR A1.
• Raspberry Pi 4 running ROS Noetic for SLAM data handling.
• Arduino-based motor control (front-wheel drive with PWM speed tuning).
• Headless operation: remote SSH and RViz visualization on an Ubuntu VM.
• Maps exported for further analysis and experimentation.

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🛠️ Hardware & Software

• Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4B, Arduino Uno, RPLIDAR A1, L298N motor driver, DC motors, custom chassis.
• Software: ROS Noetic, Hector SLAM, RViz, Arduino IDE (C++), Ubuntu 20.04 VM, VS Code SSH.

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📷 Demo

Robot Setup

RViz Map Outputs

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RPLIDAR Setup

This project uses the rplidar_ros package.
To install:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/Slamtec/rplidar_ros.git
cd ..
catkin_make

🚀 How to Run

1. Clone this repo:

   git clone https://github.com/Ketchup3013/Sensor-mapping-robot.git

2. Launch RPLIDAR on Raspberry Pi:

   roslaunch rplidar_ros rplidar.launch

3. Run Hector SLAM on Ubuntu VM:

   roslaunch hector_slam_launch tutorial.launch