An open-source robot project

Goal

Design an in/outdoor mobile manipulating robot capable of autonomous navigation with the ability to pick up small items. Precision/repeatability should be comparable to industrial robotics. Joint torque sensing to maintain human safety, and used to protect the robot for collisions.

Demonstrate best practices for robot prototyping. Design using obtainable parts and manufacturing tolerances. Design to be assembled by a person of average skill.

Robot project is open source such that robotics engineers can use, modify, and contribute as desired. Extra space is provided in the through bore in the arm to enable running some cables with clean wire routing.

Why

Our group currently consists of 4 highly experienced electrical/mechanical/controls engineers that have been working on robotic hardware for 10's of years.

We've found that robotic hardware requires either significant experience or significant time and iterations to design, tolerance, and control robotic hardware. We've also noticed that there is significant interest in the areas of non-industrial robotics but many groups have difficulty with implementation of the hardware.

Difficulty with hardware slows progress and can lead to misleading results when implementing higher-level control and AI. At the same time, many groups have an interest in design ownership and are not interested in purchasing a platform over which they have little control. With this project, we wish to make our hardware and control experience available at no cost in order to help as much as possible growth in robotics.

 

Design targets

Music

  • 20 kg device

  • Two-wheel plus caster base.

  • 5 DOF Manipulating arm with some pulling/lifting force, easily overpowered

    • Pan, pitch, pitch, pitch, roll

    • Joint torque sensing

  • Wrist has offset roll inline with pitch to maintain close grip to wrist pitch

  • Grip options - spike, actuated spike, vacuum cup, parallel jaw, electrostatic, soft gripper

  • Strength is 500 g gripper continuous plus 10N peak

  • Base and wrist cameras

Engineering

Base

  • Ninebot mini wheels

    • Kt = .76 Nm/A, 20 A peak

    • High resolution encoder - ic haus or mps multipole

  • Ninebot 36V nominal lithium ion battery, 155 Wh

  • Basket for items

  • Camera

  • Computer - Jetson nano

  • Approximate footprint 600 x 500 WxL

  • Considering options to do 3 wheel with caster, or 2 wheel self balancing, with movable counterweight. The caster presents difficulty with getting stuck. The 2 wheel requires a counterweight to balance an outstretched arm, and some more challenging dynamics.

Arm

 

  • Harmonic Drive® based design

  • Custom motor for best integration

  • Integrated module electronics

  • Integrated torque sensor

    • Capacitive for easy assembly

  • Motor encoder

    • High-resolution MPS on rotor encoder, enables 12bit+3bit

    • Magnetic encoder to reduce the need for precise gap tolerances and cleanliness

  • Output absolute encoder

    • Magnetic encoder to reduce assembly tolerances

    • Resolution need not be as high - but it’s nice if it is

  • 0.4 x 0.4 m workspace in front of robot

  • Links 0.3 x 0.3 x 0.1 m upper arm x forearm x grip offset

Grip

 

  • Modular

Software

  • Mid-level software, custom 2 kHz real-time loop. TBD what libraries to use for dynamics. Some initial work has been done using ROS, RBDL, and simulated joystick control in order to investigate camera locations and other kinematics here: https://github.com/unhuman-io/freebot-realtime

    • Gravity compensation

    • Cartesian impedance control or

    • Inverse kinematics with joint torque limits

  • Higher-level software TBD, currently I’m like at the NVidia jetbot as a starting point.

Get in Touch

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