ROS Robotic Arm

This project has been developed with my friend Daniel and lately we have included Alberto, a mechanical engineer to help us design our robotic arm.

During our Bachelor, Daniel and I reproduced Niryo, a robotic manipulator launched on Kickstarter.

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The project of the robot is open source, so we started from printing and machining all the components, and in the first iterations of the arm, we were using several Arduinos to drive the motors. Later, we have developed our own electronics for driving the motors (see here!), and we have coded all the required software to integrate our robot with ROS, namely, the hardware interface. The ROS environment, is implemented inside a Docker container so that the implementation could be handled remotely and the working Docker image can be used with the real robot. The code for the hardware interface is mainly C++, with a few python scripts and XML (e.g., URDF and launchfiles).

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In the last months, a mechanical engineer, Alberto, joined us for redesigning the distal joints of the arm to allow us to use stepper motors so that we could use the electronic boards we have developed. The following pictures show how the mechanical design has changed so far, but the best is yet to come!