Hardware & 3D files·
The rover — FrodoBots Earth Rover Mini+·
A skid-steer four-wheel platform designed for FrodoBots' Earth Rovers network (people teleoperate them across the world; the
Mini+ is the developer edition you can own). What scout uses, as seen from the SDK's /data and media endpoints:
| subsystem | what the code reads / drives |
|---|---|
| drive | 4 hub motors, skid steer — POST /control {linear, angular} in [-1, 1], continuous frames |
| cameras | front + rear, JPEG frames via /v2/front, /v2/rear (Agora WebRTC underneath) |
| audio | mic (/rover-mic, PCM) and speaker (/rover-speaker, /speak TTS) |
| lamp | headlamp — rover_lamp, POST /api/lamp |
| telemetry | battery level/voltage/current, GPS lat/lng/signal, cellular signal, IMU accel/gyro (burst arrays), magnetometer, |
per-wheel RPM (fl/fr/rl/rr), vibration, power & network state — the 27-D observation.state (schema) |
|
| link | 4G / Wi-Fi to FrodoBots' cloud; the SDK joins the rover's Agora channel from wherever it runs |
Internals (from the official repo): an RK3588-class Linux SoC handles media, an STM32 (RT-Thread) drives motors and sensors, a Quectel EC2x/EG9x-series modem provides cellular. A community project, sssynk/earth-rover-mini-firmware, documents a drop-in firmware with a local HTTP API — interesting for a future no-cloud mode; scout does not use it.
The brain — NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor·
The reference deployment runs the slim (CPU) stack on a Jetson AGX Thor over Wi-Fi, next to the rover. The GPU is used only if you
build scout:latest for Cosmos; everything on this site works on any arm64/amd64 docker host — a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB
runs it (YOLO n on CPU, ~2–4 fps). Disk: the slim image is ~16 GB with lerobot/torch-cpu.
3D files — where they are, and why they are not here·
The official CAD is published by FrodoBots in
frodobots-org/earth-rover-mini → 3DPrint/ as STEP files:
| file | size |
|---|---|
body.stp |
1.3 MB |
front_top.stp |
3.2 MB |
back_top.stp |
1.3 MB |
back_cover.stp |
124 KB |
camera.stp |
521 KB |
mini_cover.stp |
521 KB |
The same repo carries the schematic (Hardware/Schematic/SCH_Earth_Rover_Car_2025-07-29.pdf), Gerbers (Hardware/Gerber/V6.2.4.zip),
PCB photos, the modem AT-command manual, and the STM32 + Linux SDKs.
No license = all rights reserved
As of September 2026 that repository has no LICENSE file, no license field, and 3DPrint/README.md says TODO. Under
copyright law that means all rights reserved by default — so scout links to the files and does not redistribute, convert
or remix them. If FrodoBots adds a permissive license (CC-BY, MIT, CERN-OHL…) the plan is to convert body.stp + tops to a
≤ 3 MB .glb and put the real rover on the home page. Please open an issue if you see that happen.
We also looked for community models on Printables, Thingiverse, Cults3D and GrabCAD: nothing for "Earth Rover Mini" / "FrodoBots" at the time of writing.
The model on this site·
website/assets/models/scout.glb (30 KB, 1 388 faces) is an original, stylised stand-in built from boxes and cylinders with
trimesh in the cockpit's colours — not derived from any FrodoBots CAD, photo or mesh, and not dimensionally accurate. MIT, like the
repo; see website/assets/models/LICENSE.md. It exists so the home page has something to spin.
The room scan·
cagatay_lab.usdz (1.4 MB, tracked) is an Apple RoomPlan scan of the lab the rover drives in — semantically named meshes that
tools/room_map.py turns into the spatial prompt. Scan your own room with any RoomPlan app and point SCOUT_ROOM_SCAN at it.
Adding hardware·
- A different rover — implement the SDK surface (
/control,/data,/v2/front,/speak,/rover-mic,/rover-speaker) and everything above the SDK works unchanged;ROVER_SDK_URLis the only pointer. - A PS4 controller — plug in,
controller_start;ROVER_CONTROLLER_HZ,_LINEAR_MAX,_ANGULAR_MAX,_DEADZONE. - A GPU —
docker-compose.yml+Dockerfile.scoutfor Cosmos;DET_BACKEND=locatefor open-vocabulary grounding.