Saturday 19 July 2014

ROS Smach

After trying to get smach to work for a while I finally have a working program that
I'm happy with. Smach will now monitor the battery level when the voltage goes
below 11.8 volts Robbie will say he's hungry and navigate the charging station
and then using auto dock  to complete the drive. Robbie will then charge for a set
time then return to health monitoring mode.
Future upgrades will preempt any running navigation task and will stop the charge mode when the battery is full

Thursday 10 July 2014

Arm update

Earlier while running moveit and the Inmoov arm i noticed the object pick up
looked looked strange and i had a limited range where the pickup would work.
The shoulder looked like it needed a pan joint after changing the simulation with the extra joint pickup improved a lot. So i changed the real arm grafting a pan joint on to the inmoov arm proved to hard I had played earlier with the arm out of hector robot but i didn’t like the pan setup and the lack of tilt in the shoulder so i came up with this design the gearbox has a few problems like backlash in the gears the worms are weak and keep breaking (due to the backlash ). The lift joint
all the forces push the worm down the motor shaft loosening the grub screw.
The motor drive plate will need reenforcing because it bends due to the forces applied.

The good news is that ros Moveit works Robbie can pickup a object and place in another location(in simulation) I need to understand the grasp generator better
for a better pick up the performance of pickup  is dependent on the grasp
After a bit of thought the Inmoov arm will also work