R2 Build - robmalt

I was a kid when the original Star Wars trilogy appeared. Of course R2D2 was always one of my favorite characters. How can you not love R2? Years ago I looked into building a life-size R2D2. I quickly discovered the costs were prohibitive for me and gave up on the idea.

More recently I got into 3d printing and printed a Wall-E robot. I didn’t follow the project plan for the electronics and instead used it as an opportunity to dive into Robot Operating System (ROS), which I had been interested in for a while. Wall-E turned out really well and I had a lot of fun with him. The Wall-E robot was not not 1:1 scale and I filled his internal compartment with electronics and ran out of room. I decided that I needed a bigger robot to continue my learning path.

I didn’t want to make an industrial-looking robot. While this would technically meet my needs, it’s not as fun or inspiring to me. I again started looking into building an R2D2 and found there were 3d-printed plans for this available online. After reviewing the plans it was apparent a 3D-printed R2 would be a MUCH bigger job than the little Wall-E I built. I considered this for a few months and in mid November 2023 I decided to just go for it. I chose the design files available from Michael Baddeley (if you read this Mr. Baddeley, thank you for everything!).

Again, I would select the electronics myself. Most R2 builds are remote-controlled. I was interested in building an autonomous robot that could perform mapping, navigation, object recognition and interact with humans without external commands. Because my R2 would be “different” I decided I would not recreate R2D2 from the screen, but rather build “an R2 unit”. This would give me freedom to add hardware of my choice.

At the time of this post (Jan 2024) I am still building the chassis of my R2. Below are images displaying my build progress.

Nov 20, 2023