Shhhh.... don't tell the missus.....

 Okay, I have decided to treat myself and have ordered on of these.  It's a TurtleBot3:

Yes, I know/appreciate that I've got most of these "bits" in various forms and could probably have hacked them together from junk already in my possession, however, I have booked a week off (in a few weeks time) and after I've done the gardening (assuming it doesn't rain non-stop), I don't want to spend all week trying to get the hardware to work before moving onto doing the useful software.

So.... I bought one of these with all the bits already included.  Yes, I still need to bolt it all together, but that's about an hour (tops).

Yes....that is a LIDAR on the top.... and yes, I can include an RPi camera in the middle section.  I did order it from robosavvy.com in the UK, however the RPi4 version was out-of-stock with a minimum of 2 weeks lead time... but they did have an RPI3 version available.... well, I have a "spare RPi4" and I checked... it's just a case of swapping it directly over.  no brainer.  ordered.  will arrive next week, perfectly in time for the "play week".

But, haven't we been down this road before?... well....yes and no.  Yes, as in, I have built this type of wheeled robot before, but I haven't had this level of actuator controlling the wheels before - this is more industrial than before.  Apparently they are smart and I don't have to rely on manual hacks and coding to do work with them.  (we'll see).

Yes, I've built and used ROS before, it's just the pub/sub messaging between nodes event driven coding approach that I was working on about 2years ago, I had just about got my head round it at the time - now however, thanks to work/work, that mindset and approach is easy-peasey and I'll be able to fly through writing code for it.

So, what are the plans for it?  well....I just want to make an autonomous "pet", I suppose a bit like a min-human on wheels.... something that will be genuinely curious about it's surroundings.  I really don't like the idea of "you can remote control it from your phone".... sigh...what's the point?  I want to get the Machine Learning aspects working, I want to "teach" it a few things and then I want it to be able to "learn" what is a new object; what does it look like; does it move?; does it harm me?; you know all those things a small human would go through; then I want o be able to save that data as "memory" and for the robot to be able to build upon that data and maybe even combine connections between data.

Of course, it will also be fully autonomous to move around at will.... and hopefully get fascinated by the rays of sunshine that will appear on the floor at a certain time of day (but not always due to the rain); but then tap into sensors to discover what the weather is like and associate the lack of sunshine rays on the carpet with rainy days.... I don't know, I'm sure I'll think of something that it can do & learn and who knows what it'll end up thinking / doing on it's own.  I want to give it a baseline of code and let a tiny amount of "free will" to evolve and then analyse the how's & why's.

https://emanual.robotis.com/docs/en/platform/turtlebot3/overview/

https://www.turtlebot.com/opensource/

https://robotis.co.uk/turtlebot3-burger.html