Review: Elephant Robotics myAGV

Cover of Make: 93 - How to Train Your Robot — This article appeared in *Make:* Vol 93. Subscribe for more great articles.

Price: from $949 ($1,299 as tested; $1,748 above)

While humanoids may soon be within reach of students and hobbyists, the classic four-wheel ‘bot is still the ideal base for learning, both literally and metaphorically. Elephant Robotics are established leaders in the area of robotic arms, and have developed an automated ground vehicle, myAGV, in order to free these mechatronic limbs from the desktop.

In addition to pairing with their myCobot arm to create a compound robot, the myAGV is a highly functional device in its own right, with 360° LIDAR (enabling the use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping or SLAM), a built-in camera for object detection, and advanced Mecanum wheels to allow precise omnidirectional movement.

This is the configuration of myAGV we tested

myAGV is available with either Raspberry Pi or NVIDIA Jetson Nano-powered smarts. What blew me away about this ‘bot is that it’s a complete computing device on its own: you plug in a keyboard and mouse via the onboard USB ports, then a monitor via HDMI, and then pop open VS Code on the machine itself and start interacting with it right away via the built-in Python examples. Alternately, you can use a customized block programming language to create drag-and-drop programs, or the included Playstation-style gamepad to directly manipulate the vehicle.

Once you’re up and running, built-in Wi-Fi and VNC let you disconnect the umbilicals and roam freely while you monitor operations from your laptop. While the accompanying documentation can be tricky to navigate at points, poking around the local filesystem examples and on GitHub, I discovered the AGV_UI app, which lets you test all of the major functions of the device without even touching any code, including auditioning SLAM algorithms (currently gmapping and Cartographer) and even driving around using the keyboard.

With ROS 1/2 compatibility, integrated LEGO TECHNIC and other hardware mounting points, a 2kg payload capacity, and additional GPIO, Ethernet, and power supplying capabilities, myAGV is literally the perfect platform on which to begin your hobbyist or academic robotics journey.

This article appeared in Make: Vol 93.

Robotics Technology

By David Groom

David Groom

David bought his first Arduino in 2007 as part of a Roomba hacking project. Since then, he has been obsessed with writing code that you can touch. David fell in love with the original Pebble smartwatch, and even more so with its successor, which allowed him to combine the beloved wearable with his passion for hardware hacking via its smartstrap functionality. Unable to part with his smartwatch sweetheart, David wrote a love letter to the Pebble community, which blossomed into Rebble, the service that keeps Pebbles ticking today, despite the company's demise in 2016. When he's not hacking on wearables, David can probably be found building a companion bot, experimenting with machine learning, growing his ever-increasing collection of dev boards, or hacking on DOS-based palmtops from the 90s.

Find David on Mastodon at @ishotjr@chaos.social or these other places.

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June 13th, 2025June 12th, 2025