/building · 2014
Butler Robot
irobot create · kinect · trossen arm
A robot meant to fetch coffee, built from an iRobot Create, a Trossen arm, and a Kinect depth sensor.
The stack is an iRobot Create for the base, a Trossen arm on top of it, two Arduinos, an XBee for the radio link, a Kinect for depth, and a Zotac mini PC running Ubuntu bolted into the middle of a black frame holding all of it together.
The stated goal was a robot that brings me coffee. What I got instead was a working demonstration of Moravec's paradox: the reasoning-shaped problems were tractable and the perception-and-manipulation-shaped problems were not.
Navigating a room and planning a path around obstacles is a solved problem with a Kinect and a known floor plan, and it behaved about as well as I hoped. Picking a specific object off a table without knocking the table over is not solved, and it did not.
The mechanical part of that is easy to see in the photo. The arm sits high above a base designed to carry a vacuum cleaner, so the whole platform wobbles whenever the arm swings, and it is worst exactly when the arm is extended and precision matters most. Damping the base is a real project on its own, and I never did it.
There is a video of it driving around, which is the part that worked.
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