Midterm Project
The goal of this project is to program a UR5e robot arm to trace my initials (DRC) with its end effector. The robot was programmed using the ROS framework in Python.
First I found a position in which the UR5e robot arm was free to move in any direction. This became the "Home" position and I wrote a function to return the robot to this position. Then, I wrote functions to trace a "D", "R", and "C". Each of these functions specify waypoints for the end effector to hit and are parameterized by the height of each letter, the size of steps between generated waypoints, and the maximum jump size that the end effoctor can make between consecutive waypoints.
Technologies Used:
Robot Operating System (ROS), Python
Gazebo
Final Project
The Final Project for this class was to explore a topic in robotics. The group I was a part of chose to design a novel robot to complete a task in simulation. The task we chose was to shoot small Ping Pong balls into cups placed on a table.
Our group chose to design a robot with two revolute joints and one prismatic joint. The first revolute joint is used to control the "pan" of the robot. The second revolute joint is used to control the "tilt" of the robot. The prismatic joint acts as our end effector, launching the ball inside the barrel of the robot. The robot was built in Fusion360, then exported to SolidWorks to be converted into a URDF that could be parsed by the MoveIt setup assistant.
Once we were able to generate the proper Gazebo launch files, we directly controlled the robot by writing position values to the revolute joints and force values to the prismatic slider. This allowed for precise control over where we shot the ball.
My personal contributions to this project were centered around the integration of the robot built in CAD and Gazebo. Using a SolidWorks plugin, I configured the robot to be exported as a URDF. Once it was in this format, I used the MoveIt setup assistant to assign controllers to the joints and generate the launch files used to put the robot into Gazebo. Additionally, I did research and testing to figure out how to best control the robot and get the behavior we desired.
Technologies Used:
SolidWorks, Fusion360
Robot Operating System (ROS), Python
Gazebo
MoveIt