[HN Gopher] Crash - A real-time creative coding environment for ...
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Crash - A real-time creative coding environment for robot arms
Author : rolph
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-07-18 05:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hackaday.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (hackaday.io)
| fareesh wrote:
| Does anyone have any advice for how a newcomer to this field can
| start trying things out?
|
| What's a good arm brand and model that's affordable and versatile
| enough to do interesting beginner projects with?
|
| What are the development tools like? Is there some kind of
| industry standard that's approachable for mere mortals or is it
| some esoteric set of low level APIs?
|
| Any YouTube channel recommendations that cover these topics would
| be great too!
| jmptable wrote:
| I would recommend starting with simulators! Industrial robot
| arms are expensive and the cheap arms designed for hobbyists
| aren't very useful because they lack payload capacity, reach,
| and degrees of freedom. But there are good simulators out there
| which let you build software or test applications with robot
| arms without having any real hardware. You can even have real-
| time physics-based interactions with the simulated world. It
| can feel like a video game.
|
| My favorite for messing around is CoppeliaSim. It is relatively
| easy for beginners (you can just drag robots from the library
| into your sim scene and they will start doing things) but also
| powerful. It has a free education version but unfortunately
| it's commercial software. There's also Webots which "feels"
| similar but is open source. I found it a little harder to get
| going in but still very capable.
|
| On the harder but more rewarding end of the scale there's the
| Robot Operating System (ROS) + Gazebo. ROS is used for many
| real robots both in academia (see the ETH Zurich work on
| ANYmal) and in industry (see Ghost Robotics). Gazebo is a
| simulator that is designed to work in ROS. You can build a
| control system on top of ROS and watch your virtual robot solve
| problems in Gazebo, and then you can flip the switch and run it
| with a real robot.
|
| If you do decide to buy a robot arm I would recommend myCobot
| from Elephant Robotics. It's cheap (~$600), made of plastic,
| weak, etc. but has 6 degrees of freedom and enough capability
| to do real projects. If you play with something like that and
| get obsessed then I recommend taking a look at robots on eBay.
| Kind of counter-intuitively used giant heavy metal industrial
| robot arms are often cheaper (~$20k or less) than the "cobots"
| that are small and safe ($50k or more). That's because so many
| of the giant ones are out there in the world and are reaching
| the end of their normal lives. Sometimes owners are willing to
| pay to have them removed because it's such a hassle to deal
| with them. The big ones have to be bolted to the floor (after a
| structural engineer gives the ok on the dynamic loading on the
| building they're being put in) and you need industrial power.
| Also they often have archaic control systems running Windows
| (e.g. Kuka KRC) that have to be coaxed back to life with sparse
| information. If you go that route then the robot-forum site
| will be your lifeline.
|
| On the development tool side I highly recommend finding a robot
| that already has ROS support. E.g. the ROS Industrial Kuka
| Experimental package for Kuka arms. The actual underlying
| interfaces/APIs (e.g. RSI or the fast research interface for
| Kuka arms) can be a massive pain to deal with. Newer robots are
| much nicer to deal with. There are a lot of cheap arms coming
| out of China that come with real-time ROS compatibility out of
| the box. Like the Z1 from Unitree, which I'm very excited
| about. Universal Robots bots are also well-supported in ROS and
| the underlying controller programming is relatively sane. You
| can find UR bots in many schools. Take a look at AATB for
| examples of that avenue.
|
| Robots are hard and fun! I highly recommend giving the field a
| try. It's a great time for it.
| [deleted]
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