An autonomous mobile robot can move from its current position to the goal position autonomously with the help of mapping and localizing algorithms. ROS provides some powerful packages to prototype an autonomous mobile robot from scratch. Some of the packages used in an autonomous robot are the ROS navigation stack, gmapping, and amcl. Combining these packages, we can build our own autonomous mobile robot. In this chapter, we will see a DIY autonomous mobile robot platform that works using ROS. This project is actually the updated version of the work mentioned in my first book, Learning Robotics Using Python, Packt Publishing (http://learn-robotics.com). In this chapter, we will mainly go through designing and building the simulation of a robot, then the hardware of robot, and finally the software framework. The chapter will be an abstract of all these things, since explaining everything in a single chapter will be a tedious task.

The following are the main topics we will discuss on this chapter:

• Robot specification and design overview
• Designing and selecting motors and wheels for the robot
• Building a 2D and 3D model of the robot body
• Simulating the robot model in Gazebo
• Designing and building actual robot hardware
• Interfacing robot hardware with ROS
• Setting up the ROS navigation stack and gmapping packages
• Final run