Alexander Kirillov's Yozh Is an Expandable, Compact, Open Source Robot for Education and More
Inspired by the Pololu Zumo, this "hedgehog" was put together as the perfect platform for summer camp robotics clubs.
Maker and educator Alexander Kirillov has put together an open source tracked robot design for a summer camp's robotics class, inspired by the Pololu Zumo — but with, he claims, many improvements: the Yozh.
"Sure, there are dozens of existing robots. However, when I started choosing a robot for my summer camp, none of them seemed to be quite what I wanted," Kirillov explains, highlighting requirements including a compact size, support for Python, at least five on-board sensors, and expansion capabilities. "I looked at Pololu's Zumo and 3 Pi+, DFRobot's Maqueen Plus, and Pimoroni's Trilobot. None of them satisfied all my requirements, so I built my own. It took a while — designing the boards, writing the library, and more, but at the end it was worth it."
The Yozh itself is a short robot running on two rubber tracks, measuring just 4.8cm (around 1.9") at its highest point. The Pololu motors are driven from a custom electronics board, which also forms the chassis, with an Adafruit ESP32-S3 Feather as the primary microcontroller running CircuitPython and a Microchip SAM D21 as a coprocessor for low-level operations including interfacing with the motors' encoders and running a closed-loop proportional–integral–derivative (PID) control system for maintaining a stable speed.
Its standard sensor package includes a seven-sensor infrared (IR) reflectance array for line-following tasks, two front-facing STMicro VL53L0X time-of-flight (TOF) distance sensors, and a six degrees of freedom (6DOF) inertial measurement unit (IMU) with sensor fusion in firmware. Other features include two RGB LEDs and a buzzer for feedback, four RGBW LEDs as headlights, and a user interface based around a 240×135 color TFT display and three buttons.
For expansion, the Yozh chassis — named for the Russian for "hedgehog" includes two servo connectors, two Qwiic/STEMMA QT compatible I2C headers, and a range of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. "Yozh is compatible with mechanical attachments (grabber, forklift…) by DFRobot," Kirillov adds, while also demonstrating an on-device computer vision application — the recognition of a container marked with an AprilTag — using an add-on DFRobot Huskylens camera.
Full details on the Yozh are available on the project website, while the design files and source code are published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license; more information can be found on Kirillov's Hackaday.io page.