TurtleBot 4 Pre-Orders are Now Open!
We are happy to announce that pre-orders are now open for the TurtleBot 4! After a deep collaboration with our partners at Clearpath Robotics, the world’s first native ROS 2 TurtleBot is now available for pre-order! We’re incredibly excited to reach this milestone as it is huge accomplishment for Open Robotics, ROS 2, and the TurtleBot line of educational robots. We look forward to having a dedicated hardware platform for ROS 2 education; and we’re sure the community will enjoy the wonderful new features we’ve packed into the TurtleBot 4. While the manufacturing and design of the TurtleBot 4 was led by Clearpath Robotics, it really has been a team effort between multiple organizations in the ROS 2 ecosystem. The results are truly a work of shared vision by a number of leaders in the field of robotics.
The Process and Preorders
We’ve spent well over two years laying the groundwork for this version of the TurtleBot, with the first early discussions occurring shortly before the pandemic. Clearpath Robotics is responsible for both the design and the manufacturing, but we’ve also been collaborating with the likes of iRobot and Luxonis / OpenCV along the way to make the the best TurtleBot yet.
The new TB4 will come in two flavors: standard and lite, with the standard coming fully assembled and and lite being shipped as an easy to assemble kit. TurtleBot 4 Standard and Lite will be available in North America, Europe and Asia through authorized global distributors with an MSRP of $1,750 and $1,095 USD, respectively, and will begin shipping in July 2022. Full pre-order information can be found on the Clearpath Robotics website.
The Highlights
Charging via dock with docking behaviors
Internal computer storage
Programmable screen and buttons
Two different versions
Technical Specifications
Here is a quick comparison table from Clearpath
- Both TB4 Standard and TB4 Lite will using the iRobot Create 3 as their mobile base. This Create 3 includes:
- A charging dock with auto-home feature!
- A full line suite of sensors, actuators, communications, and ports (IMU, bump, cliff, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB-C etc).
- Sensors and actuators exposed via ROS 2. The Create 3 runs ROS 2.
- A storage drawer.
- A hackable top plate.
- Stand-alone Gazebo simulation.
- Sensors
- An RPLidar 2D LIDAR
- A Luxonis OAK-D depth sensor
- An OAK-D Lite on the TurtleBot 4 Lite
- An OAK-D Pro on the TurtleBot 4 Standard
- Compute
- RaspberryPi 4B (4MB) – (aka unobtanium)
- On the TurtleBot 4 Standard
- A top plate for mounting your sensors.
- A monochrome LCD screen to display debug messages, IP addresses, and control information.
- Buttons – use a standard configuration or program them to run your demo behavior.
- Power distribution
- A USB-C power breakout board
- Software / Documentation
- The TB4 will ship with Galactic with plans to upgrade to Humble as soon as possible.
- A full simulation for each robot
- A manual and tutorials
- A set of slides and courses for educators
- Most of the CAD models will be released under a permissive license.
Turtlebot4 Simulation on Gazebo Edifice (Fortress coming soon).
That’s the short of it! You can find out more details, and put in your pre-order on the Clearpath Robotics website. Given the supply chain situation I would encourage everyone who is interested to pre-order their robot as soon as possible. We’ll be hosting a ton of events in the next few months ahead of the release so keep your eyes open. If you are an educator who would like to use the TB4 in the classroom please reach out to me.
Please feel free to post your questions below and we’ll try to answer them as best we can.