Reading Room
How Mobile Robots Are Used in Bridge and Infrastructure Inspection
TL;DR: Robot infrastructure inspection can replace some rope-access surveys and scaffolding with mobile ground robots, drones, and crawlers that carry…
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Modular Robotics: Why Swappable Payloads Are the Future of Field UGVs
TL;DR: A modular UGV with swappable payloads lets one chassis serve multiple missions (inspection, mapping, sampling, communications relay) without rebuilding…
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From PCB to Field Robot: What Designing a Custom Controller Board Looks Like
TL;DR: Designing a custom robot controller board for a field UGV is less about picking the fanciest MCU and more…
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How We 3D Print Custom Parts for Leo Rover: Materials, Process, and Tradeoffs
TL;DR: Fictionlab’s team uses 3D printed robot parts extensively across the Leo Rover platform – from sensor mounts and antenna…
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Raph Rover: Built for When Leo Rover Isn’t Enough – A Technical Deep Dive
TL;DR: Raph Rover is Fictionlab’s heavy-duty UGV designed for outdoor field robotics where the Leo Rover platform hits its payload,…
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Raspberry Pi vs. NVIDIA Jetson vs. Intel NUC: Choosing the Right Brain for Your Robot
TL;DR: When you compare Raspberry Pi vs Jetson robot computing, the choice comes down to workload, power budget, and software…
Read moreBattery and Power Management for Field Robots: Runtime, Charging, and Hot Swapping
TL;DR: Field robot battery management decides whether your mission finishes or stalls in the middle of a field. You need…
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How to Design a Payload System for a Mobile Robot: Mounting, Weight, and Power
TL;DR: Robot payload design is the engineering discipline of integrating sensors, manipulators, and computing onto a mobile base without breaking…
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IP Ratings Explained: What IP54, IP65, and IP67 Actually Mean for Your Robot
TL;DR: The IP rating of a robot is a two-digit code defined by IEC 60529 that tells you how well…
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Camera + LiDAR Fusion: How to Build a Perception Stack for an Outdoor UGV
TL;DR: Camera + LiDAR fusion in ROS 2 combines dense color information from an RGB or RGB-D camera with accurate…
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Radar vs. LiDAR for Outdoor Robots: When Rain Wins and When It Doesn’t
TL;DR: In the radar vs lidar outdoor robot debate, neither sensor wins universally. LiDAR gives you centimeter-level geometry and dense…
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How to Properly Calibrate an IMU on a Mobile Robot (And Why Most Teams Skip It)
TL;DR: Proper IMU calibration in ROS 2 means three things: removing static bias from accelerometers and gyroscopes, characterizing noise with…
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