Roadmap

In progress

Solar panels

Truly autonomous system must not depend on humans for charging its batteries.

Remote control using hobby RC radio

Currently robot is controlled via browser. Which is very versatile because it can be used with laptop, tablet of phone. Unfortunately screen is not very usable outdoors in the bright sunlight. It is way easier to control robot with RC radio than keyboard or touch screen.

Pressure sensors

Pneumatic part of the robot was neglected mostly because lack of pressure sensors made it not very safe to operate not on horizontal surfaces.

Planned

New control computer

BeagleBone Blue is amazing robotics platform but it is showing its age. WiFi connectivity is quite bad and lack of USB3 cripples RealSense camera capabilities. I see two options here:

1. either migrate to more powerful computer
2. or migrate to low power, long battery life microcontroller so that the robot can be always on and have an additional edge computing device which can be switched on/off on demand.

Waterproofing

Robot morphology allows locomotion on and under water but without proper waterproofing experimentation is limited.