Tank treads, a Raspberry Pi, and an ESP32 walk into a field, and the result is Waveshare's UGV Beast, a tracked robot platform built for outdoor terrain that would chew up wheeled alternatives. The dual continuous tracks can pivot in place with a zero-meter turning radius, while a 2 mm aluminum alloy chassis and stainless steel suspension keep everything intact over rough ground. It measures 23.2 x 19.7 x 12.2 cm (9.1 x 7.8 x 4.8 inches) without the camera and weighs about 2 kg (4.5 lbs), making it compact enough to carry but sturdy enough to handle real dirt.
The architecture splits duties between two controllers. A Raspberry Pi 4B or 5 handles the high-level AI vision and strategy work, running Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Bookworm) with ROS2 Humble LTS. An ESP32 sub-controller manages the motors, servos, and a 9-axis ICM20948 IMU for image stabilization, communicating over the board's dual TB6612FNG motor drivers. The ESP32 also supports ESP-NOW for peer-to-peer, low-latency communication between multiple robots. Connectivity options include Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 5, and Bluetooth 5 from the Pi side, with an optional 4G LTE or 5G cellular module for remote field operations.
On the software side, Waveshare built a lightweight Flask web app with WebRTC for ultra-low latency video streaming, so control happens through any browser on a phone, tablet, or PC with no dedicated app required. Python is the primary programming language, with OpenCV support for color recognition, face recognition, gesture control, and line tracking. The MediaPipe framework can be layered in for more advanced real-time computer vision tasks. Waveshare has published the full software stack under the GNU General Public License v3+, with the Raspberry Pi application layer at ugv_rpi and the ESP32 ROS motor driver at ugv_base_ros on GitHub, giving tinkerers a clean path to fork and modify either layer of the stack independently. An optional pan-and-tilt camera module adds a 5MP, 160-degree field-of-view camera on high-torque ST3215 servos with 360-degree horizontal and 120-degree vertical rotation, plus an LED light for low-light conditions. Tutorials and software resources are available on Waveshare's wiki.
The UGV Beast chassis starts at $265 (€244) from Waveshare's store without a Raspberry Pi or camera. Full kits bundled with the pan-and-tilt camera and a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 preloaded with ROS2 run up to around $500 (€460), and a configuration with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 4GB is available for roughly $1,200 (€1,104). Power comes from three 18650 lithium cells in a 3S UPS module, and a pair of 1020 European standard profile rails on top make it straightforward to mount peripherals like D500 or STL-27L lidar units.
