Reading Room
blog, news, case studies
Buying a Research Robot With Grant Money: Procurement, Lead Times, Shipping and VAT
Buying a research robot with grant money: what to put in the RFQ, lead times to confirm, shipping, Incoterms and…
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Benchmarking Perception Workloads on a Rover: Jetson Orin Nano vs Raspberry Pi 5
Jetson Orin Nano vs Raspberry Pi 5 on one rover: throughput, latency, power draw and cost per frame for object…
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From rosbag to Dataset: Building an ML Training Pipeline From Field Recordings
Turn field rosbag recordings into an ML training dataset: time-aligned frame extraction, anonymisation, labelling, splits by session and versioning of…
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How to Run a Repeatable Outdoor Field Test: A Protocol You Can Cite
A citable protocol for repeatable outdoor robot field tests: route definition, initial conditions, run count, logged variables and clear criteria…
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When SLAM Drifts: Diagnosing Loop Closure Failures on a Real Rover
Five common causes of SLAM drift and loop closure failure on a real rover, how to confirm each one from…
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Docker on Robots: When Containers Help and When They Quietly Hurt Performance
When Docker helps on a robot and when it quietly hurts: GPU and device access, DDS networking, boot time on…
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Migrating a Production Robot From ROS 2 Humble to Jazzy: A Field Report
Migrating a production robot from ROS 2 Humble to Jazzy: what broke, how long it took, a parallel-workspace strategy that…
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Fusing GNSS, IMU and Wheel Odometry With robot_localization: A Working EKF Config
A working robot_localization setup fusing GNSS, IMU and wheel odometry: two EKF instances, navsat_transform, covariance choices, a commented YAML and…
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Wi-Fi, LoRa or LTE: Choosing Comms for an Outdoor Robot
Wi-Fi, LoRa or LTE for an outdoor robot? Range, bandwidth, latency, power and cost compared, plus why most field deployments…
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Teleoperating a UGV Over LTE and 5G: The Latency Budget Nobody Publishes
Where the milliseconds go when you teleoperate a UGV over LTE or 5G: a stage-by-stage latency budget, what drives acceptable…
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From Prototype to Small Series: What Actually Changes in Custom Robot Development
What really changes when a robot prototype becomes a small series: long-lifecycle components, procedural assembly, controlled documentation, acceptance testing and…
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Writing a URDF for Your Own Chassis: From CAD to a Robot ROS 2 Understands
Turn your own chassis CAD into a URDF that ROS 2 understands: links and joints, inertias, collision meshes, reusable xacro…
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