TurtleBot3 Obstacle Avoidance & ArUco Marker Navigation

Tools & Technologies: TurtleBot3 Burger, ROS2 Humble, LiDAR, Raspberry Pi camera, Gazebo, RViz, Python

• Developed a LiDAR-based obstacle avoidance pipeline on TurtleBot3 Burger using two ROS2 nodes: obstacle_detector (monitors the front LiDAR sector and publishes Boolean obstacle topics) and obstacle_avoidance (overrides velocity commands to turn and back away when an obstacle is within 30 cm).
• Integrated a Raspberry Pi camera onto TurtleBot3 Burger, a non-standard hardware addition, calibrated its intrinsic parameters using a ROS2 checkerboard calibration package, and added a static TF frame to correctly represent the camera pose relative to the robot base link.
• Implemented ArUco marker tracking and following: the aruco_follower node fuses camera-derived heading to the marker with LiDAR range measurements to drive the robot to a target distance while stopping when the marker leaves the camera’s field of view.
• Validated both algorithms first in Gazebo simulation, then transferred them to the real robot with LiDAR noise filtering adjustments for reliable real-world performance.