WLS robotics formed in early 2021, as Prof. Dr. Stefan May of the OHM university stumbled across an extracurricular technology course offered by our school, the WLS, and decided to lend support and introduce the world of robotics.
We lay focus on creating simple and easy-to-maintain educational robots using ROS, micro-ROS, EduArt's drive system and off-the-shelf electronics. With the goal of acquiring and passing on the skills and knowledge required to work on mobile platforms, be it mechanics, electronics, software or just plain old troubleshooting.
We began our adventure with Zyklop, using a very simple design and purely hardware from EduArt.
It is almost twice as large as the other robots, and won't fit into a RMRC course, but it taught us the basics (and most common issues).
Zyklop repository
Zyklop wiki
Zyklop kanban/TODOs
Iterating on what we learned from Zyklop, we built the Bento-Box.
To date this is our most developed robot, with the most features and highest reliability, and champion of the Robocup German open.
Bento-Box repository
Bento-Box wiki
Bento-Box kanban/TODOs
However, Bento-Box really struggles at climbing ledges and stairs. As EduArt offered us new hardware, we decided to try out a flipper-based robot, naming it Schäufele.
We are still learning how to make articulated tracks behave nicely, so Schäufele can be difficult at times. But preliminary results are very promising.
Schäufele repository
Schäufele wiki
Schäufele kanban/TODOs
To compete at the Robocup RMRC and German open with two robots, Bento-Box and Schäufele, we needed two teams.
And to clarify our connection to our school, we rebranded to WLS Robotics, with the sub-teams Willi-Bots (Schäufele) and Team Bento (Bento-Box) both competing.
