I recently had the luck to come across a Clearpath Jackal chassis on the Facebook marketplace. The Jackal is a very common research and development UGV, however models from Clearpath can cost upwards of $18,000. Needless to say, I got the chassis at a much lower price point. There are various issues with the chassis, yet none are (currently) unsolvable.
My guess is that whoever originally got rid of this unit had a custom hardware solution that was worth a lot more than the base kit. Either that or there was some sort of confidential material handling with the hardware/software. Accordingly, when they went to scrap the chassis, they just cut every connection between the hardware and the chassis, so that the controllers, computer, and other embedded equipment could be sold or destroyed.
My plan is to restore the chassis to working order and be able to host functionality on it using ROS. I think the first use case will be some sort of outdoor GPS waypoint follower, or perhaps an indoor mapper with a LiDAR unit. I’ve had experience with the latter during my undergraduate studies at WPI, and I take issue with the odometry readings from a 4-wheeled skid-steer robot.
Lombardi Engineering 