Over the years TurtleBot has taken on a life of it’s own, far from the early beginnings that started at Willow Garage with Tully and I trying to build an easily accessible ROS platform. Today TurtleBot is a foundational platform for teaching undergraduate level robotics. Since 2010, when the first version of TurtleBot was created, there are now three new versions made by Yujin, Robotis, and Clearpath & IRobot sold worldwide.
A Brief History
The TurtleBot started as a dual purpose internal Willow Garage project. With the Kinect having just been released, we saw an opportunity to create a mobile robot with many of the capabilities of the PR2 in an entry level platform. We (Tully Foote and I) proposed the project for creating a simple mobile robot good enough to do multi robot research and provide an example of how simple a robot could be to leverage the diverse capabilities of ROS. We started with the idea that it should be easy to buy, build, and assemble the robot, which meant using off the shelf consumer products and parts that easily could be created from standard materials.
In the open culture of Willow Garage, we had several visitors in the building who saw the prototype and said, “I’d like to have some of those. Are they available?” From this we realized that there was more than DIY demand for the TurtleBots. This interest lead us to polish the design focusing on simplicity and user experience. In addition we started building up the TurtleBot community based on top of the open source hardware design we released.
In fact here is a picture of my first “TurtleBot” prototype for the tutorial I made for wiring a kinect and a create together.
Early articles about TurtleBot: