Jackal J100 UGV

A mobile base built for manipulation

The Jackal J100 is a Clearpath unmanned ground vehicle — a compact, rugged platform that gives the team a stable base to mount a manipulation arm on rather than a fixed test rig. A Kinova Gen3 Lite arm rides on top, six degrees of freedom ending in a two-finger gripper, turning the Jackal from a mobile platform into a mobile manipulator that can reach for and grasp objects in its own path.

Sensing the space around it

An Intel RealSense D435 depth camera gives the arm's control stack a 3D view of what's in front of it, while a SICK TIM-551 2D lidar sweeps the ground plane around the base for obstacles. Both feed into a ROS 2 Jazzy stack running over Zenoh middleware, which keeps sensor and control traffic moving between the robot's onboard compute and the rest of the system.

The ΔΕΘ demo

At the Thessaloniki International Fair (ΔΕΘ) on 6 September 2026, the Jackal will run two booth-scale behaviors instead of a full autonomous mission. On demand, the arm will cycle through a showcase of preset poses — reach, extend, open and close the gripper — so visitors can see the manipulation hardware work without needing a scripted pick-and-place task. Separately, the base will run a reactive lidar wander-and-avoid behavior: it moves and steers clear of obstacles using the lidar alone, with a joystick always able to override and take control. Both behaviors are deliberately scoped without Nav2 or SLAM — a full autonomy stack isn't the point of this demo, and skipping it keeps the booth run predictable.