Review: Elephant Robotics myAGV

Manufacturer: Elephant Robotics

Price: from $949 ($1,299 as tested; $1,748 above)

While humanoids may soon be within reach of students and hobbyists, the classic four-wheel ‘bot is still the ideal base for learning, both literally and metaphorically. Elephant Robotics are established leaders in the area of robotic arms, and have developed an automated ground vehicle, myAGV, in order to free these mechatronic limbs from the desktop.

In addition to pairing with their myCobot arm to create a compound robot, the myAGV is a highly functional device in its own right, with 360° LIDAR (enabling the use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping or SLAM), a built-in camera for object detection, and advanced Mecanum wheels to allow precise omnidirectional movement.

myAGV is available with either Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson Nano-powered smarts. What blew me away about this ‘bot is that it’s a complete computing device on its own: you plug in a keyboard and mouse via the onboard USB ports, then a monitor via HDMI, and then pop open VS Code on the machine itself and start interacting with it right away via the built-in Python examples. Alternately, you can use a customized block programming language to create drag-and-drop programs, or the included Playstation-style gamepad to directly manipulate the vehicle.

Once you’re up and running, built-in Wi-Fi and VNC let you disconnect the umbilicals and roam freely while you monitor operations from your laptop. While the accompanying documentation can be tricky to navigate at points, poking around the local filesystem examples and on GitHub, I discovered the AGV_UI app, which lets you test all of the major functions of the device without even touching any code, including auditioning SLAM algorithms (currently gmapping and Cartographer) and even driving around using the keyboard.

With ROS 1/2 compatibility, integrated LEGO TECHNIC and other hardware mounting points, a 2kg payload capacity, and additional GPIO, Ethernet, and power supplying capabilities, myAGV is literally the perfect platform on which to begin your hobbyist or academic robotics journey.

This article appeared in Make: Vol 93.