Online robotic, Robotics, Robotics and AI tutor - Nottingham, United Kingdom - TeacherOn

Description

MISSION :
Control of a Robot Manipulator Arm for a Pick and Place Task

Learning outcomes: 1, 2, 3


Scenario:
A manipulator arm is equipped with a camera at its end-effector.
The existing controller already provides behaviours to move
the robot in joint and/or task space and to open/close the gripper.
There are five cubes randomly distributed in the robot's work space,
and there is a crate, which is always in the same spot.


Task:
Use the camera to detect the cubes. Implement a controller for the
manipulator arm that clears the objects from the table and drops
them into the crate.


Hints:
1) INSTALLATION
The project requires the kinpy library, which you should install into
your environment. It is an open source library, so you can directly
look at the code on github.

2) TRANSFORMS
You can move the robot in task space by computing the inverse kinematics.
The kinpy.
Transform object describes the pose in task space.

See more details here:
It consists of a pos (position as [x, y, z]) and rot (rotation).
The rotation is a quaternion in the [w, x, y, z] format. You can include
other libraries to convert between rotation representations, such as
rotation matrices, axis-angle, and Euler angles. Just be aware that some
there is an alternative convention for the order of elements in a quaternion,
which is [x, y, z, w] - it is a common source of errors.
scipy.spatial.transform could be a good option, but it uses the [x, y, z, w]
convention, so you would need to convert the quaternions.

3) GRASPING
Simulating contact-rich tasks is very difficult. You might notice that
the cubes sometimes act unexpectedly when being grasped.
It is generally a good idea to align the gripper as best as possible to the
parallel surfaces of the cube, and to only move with low velocity when
picking up an object.


Level:
Masters/Postgraduate


Gender Preference:
None


Meeting options:
Available online - via skype etc.
At home - Student can meet at their place.