TurtleBot

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The most common open-source small wheeled mobile robot kit for learning ROS.

TurtleBot is a low-cost, open-source personal robot kit created in November 2010 by Melonee Wise and Tully Foote at Willow Garage, growing up alongside ROS (Robot Operating System). It's a differential-drive wheeled base with sensors and an onboard computer, with no arm, used mainly to learn mapping, localization, and navigation. Two generations are current: TurtleBot 3, a collaboration between Open Robotics and ROBOTIS, with models like Burger and Waffle Pi; and TurtleBot 4, a collaboration between Open Robotics and Clearpath Robotics, built on the iRobot Create 3 base with lidar and an OAK-D depth camera, running ROS 2 by default. Official ROS tutorials and navigation frameworks like Nav2 use it heavily as their example platform, making it the standard teaching tool for getting started with mobile robots.

ExampleFollowing the ROS 2 tutorials, a TurtleBot 4 runs SLAM to build a map of a room, then uses Nav2 to autonomously drive to a specified location.

Also called: TurtleBot 3, TurtleBot 4
Related: Robot Operating System · Robot Operating System 2 · Differential Drive Base · Simultaneous Localization and Mapping · ROS 2 Navigation Stack (Nav2) · Wheeled Robot
Sources: TurtleBot 官网 (Chinese)
As of: 2026-09