Robotic Arm Simulations
Probably the greatest limitation for me to participate in the field of robotics is the lack of money. Robots, specifically programmable robotic arms, are expensive. Even the cheaper education purpose robots will run a student or teacher a couple of hundred dollars.
With plenty of nothing to do during the holiday season, I tried to quickly address my monetary problem by building a python program that would allow for the construction and simulation of robotic models. This idea was inspired from a similar code that was presented during my first college robotics class. The original code created very similar models to the one displayed below. Unfortunately, the program was developed in Matlab, which few lower level academic institutions have access to. Seeing as python is more accessible and widely used, I built the simulations using the language.
During the three week break, I was able to model forward kinematics of planar and 3D robots. The 3D robot program allows users to design their robots with prismatic and revolute joints. To display the robotic model, two libraries were tested. The current iteration uses matplotlib which is useful for displaying data. However, I find that matplotlib is not built well for dynamic data. Although I admit my current method for manipulating the 3D model is not the best, further research supported using other 3D libraries for dynamic graphics. For future renditions I may switch to using openGL.
Furthermore, the current program only supports forward kinematic manipulation, which isn’t very practical for autonomous robotics. Future plans involve developing inverse kinematics for specific robot designs and the planar robots.
The long term goal with this project is to develop an educational platform. When I took my first robotics class, there was a noticeable absence of visual aid. Thinking of robotic manipulation purely through linear algebra may be wonderful for those adept in the field. When teaching younger students, especially at the high school or early college level, visual representation of geometric and algebraic concepts will be helpful. So I plan to use these programs in the future to ease the transition to robotic mathematics for new students.
Github Links
The code for this project is freely available on my Github. Instructions on how to use the robots are in the Readme files. Keep in mind both these projects are a works in progress and are not optimized.
Planar Robot:
