OpenScout

OpenScout is an open source hardware and software mobile robot designed for both indoor and outdoor tasks, capable of carrying payloads up to 15kg. Built from standard 20x20 aluminium extrusions on a modular chassis, it uses a four-wheel differential drive with a "Lazy Susan" revolute hinge in the middle of the body, letting the wheels traverse uneven terrain (tested over ~40mm divots) without needing suspension.

The reference build costs roughly $350 USD in commodity parts: four 90:1 12V gearmotors with encoders, an Arduino Mega 2560 running an encoder-based PID speed loop, dual L298N motor drivers, and a 12V lead-acid battery. A 2024/2025 revision adds an ESP32 bridge that receives Twist-style velocity commands over WiFi/MQTT and relays them to the Arduino for motor control, and the project ships a full ROS2 (Jazzy) + Gazebo Harmonic simulation package for testing drive behavior before touching hardware.

OpenScout was featured on Hackaday (2022) as "a straightforward and easy build without many specialized tools," and is documented with a fully annotated PDF instruction manual, CAD/STEP files, wiring schematics, and a step-by-step assembly tutorial covering chassis, motors/wheels, and electronics (roughly 6.5 hours total build time).

Source: https://github.com/cbedio/OpenScout Creator: cbedio and contributors (Robbie Cato, Bartosz Krawczyk, Ahmed Elbary, Nivetha Sakthivel, Kaung Myat, Jagdish Patil, Anyeh Ndi-Tah) License: GNU GPL-3.0 (software), CERN-OHL-W (hardware), CC BY-SA (documentation)