News

Friday Facts 14: All the Sixi robot arms so far (demo at end)

Discord user Wted00 said “You talk about Sixi 3 a lot. What ever happened to Sixi 1 and 2?” Great question, long answer. This video covers robot arms before Sixi and then all three models of the current brand, along with interesting things learned along the way. Plus stick around for movement demos at the end.

robot arms in Robot Overlord
News

Friday Facts 11: How to add a robot arm to Robot Overlord (2022)

Robot Overlord is going to be the inkscape, the VLC, the Steam of robot arms – the one vendor-agnostic interface everyone teaches, knows, and loves. In order to get there it has to support every robot arm under the sun. This post is for robot arm makers that want to save time by not writing all their own code.

Some of the arms already available

Did you know Robot Overlord speaks natively to Marlin 3D printer firmware? Save even more time by using the same firmware.

You will need

  • A 3D CAD model of your robot arm
  • The D-H parameters of the arm in the same pose as it appears in your CAD file
  • The ability to write Java code for the Robot Overlord project
  • Some familiarity with git (forks, commits, pull requests)

Prepare your CAD file

It is easiest to export your arm into discrete moving sections, all of which with the same origin at the bottom center of the base of the arm (see slide 1). This is the same origin as the D-H parameters.

A meca500 robot, color coded with the base and six parts. the origin would be in the red part, on the same axis of rotation as the pink part

To help Robot Overlord run smoothly and to protect your IP it is recommended that you decimate the model by removing all hidden internal structures and components. Consider leaving screw heads while removing the threaded sections to save many megabytes of file size.

Each discrete section should be exported as an OBJ or STL file. (more on this later.)

The exported files should be located in /src/main/resources/[your robot folder]/. So if your robot is named Foo then it would be /src/main/resources/foo/. It would be consistent to name them base, j0, j1, etc.

Prepare your Robot Overlord class

In Robot Overlord’s /src/main/java/com/marginallyclever/robotOverlord/robots/robotArm/implementations you will find the collection of currently supported robot arms. It may be easiest to copy one of these classes and modify it for your purposes. Here is the minimum needed to code your arm. Every instance of Foo should be replaced with your class name.

public class Foo extends RobotArmIK {
	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

	public Foo() {
		super();
		setName("Foo v1");  // the name that appears to users.
	}
	
	@Override
	protected void loadModel() {
		setBaseShape(new Shape("Base","/Foo/j0.obj"));

		// The DH parameters and the model file, added in order from J0 ... J5.  
		// angles are degrees, distances are centimeters.
		// name d r alpha theta thetaMax thetaMin modelFile
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("X", 7.974,     0,270,  0,170,-170,"/Foo/j1.obj"));
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("Y", 9.131,17.889,  0,270,370, 170,"/Foo/j2.obj"));
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("Z",     0,12.435,  0,  0,150,-150,"/Foo/j3.obj"));
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("U",     0,     0,270,270,440, 100,"/Foo/j4-6.obj"));
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("V",15.616,     0, 90, 90,270,-90,"/Foo/j5-6.obj"));
		addBone(new RobotArmBone("W",  5.12,     0,  0, 180,360,   0,"/Foo/j6-6.obj"));

		adjustModelOriginsToDHLinks();
		setTextureFilename("/Foo/texture.png");
	}
}

Now that the arm can be loaded by the app it needs to be on the menu of things that can be created by the user. In /src/main/java/com/marginallyclever/robotOverlord/EntityFactory.java add your new class:

public class EntityFactory {
	private static Class<?> [] available = {
		// ...
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Mantis.class,
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Sixi2.class,
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Sixi3_5axis.class,
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Sixi3_6axis.class,
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Thor.class,
		com.marginallyclever.robotOverlord.robots.robotArm.implementations.Foo.class,  // "Foo" must be your class name.
	};
	// ...
}

Now when you run the application and open the Add menu your robot name will appear.

‘Foo v1’ will appear on this list

Model size and orientation fixes

It is possible that your model appears in Robot Overlord too large, too small, or the parts are rotated in a strange way. My solution is to use a modelling program like Blender to rotate, scale, decimate, and even texture the model.

Forward and Up will control the rotation. +Z is always up in a Robot Overlord scene.

Selection Only will simplify your exporting from Blender. In the image above it will only export J2.

Scale will control the size. For models that appear in meters instead of centimeters, choose 0.1. If your model is imperial, you’ll probably want 2.54.

Now share it with …the world!

You’ve changed the code, you’ve massaged the model, it runs on your machine. Now to share it with everyone else! A pull request from you to the Robot Overlord project will tell the dev team that your stuff is ready. This is the best way to make sure your model gets in the way you want it.

No time? Let us do it for you.

We can add your model(s) to our system. Contact us! We’re looking to collaborate and work with everyone. Writing the class is free; preparing the CAD files is specialized work we outsource and will quote.

What about URDF files?

URDF is the Unified Robot Description Format, part of ROS, the Robot Operating System. ROS is a nice system but much harder to get running – part of the reason I work on Robot Overlord. Join the Robot Overlord github project and help make it happen? Imagine what we could do together!

News

Friday Facts 3: Sixi 3 Java GUI

This week I’ve done a lot to make driving the Sixi 3 arm easier.

You’ll recall from FF1 that I had build a Panel to talk to a robot in Javax Swing.

TextInterfaceToListeners (at the bottom) was the starting point. Then I made a ConversationHistoryList (in the middle). The two are tied togeter in a TextInterfaceWithHistory, such that hitting send copies the message to the history and clicking a line in the history copies it to the input field. Next I made a ChooseConnectionPanel (at the top) and attached that to the TextInterfaceWithHistory inside a TextInterfaceToNetworkSession. Sure, it could have all been in one giant class… but that’s hard to manage, debug, or reuse.

Having made all that, I found it was no better than the existing Arduino serial interface for talking to the robot. My biggest worry is that I make a typo and send the robot crashing through the table before I can hit the emergency stop. So to address this pain point, I needed a way to drive more intuitively.

The Dial

The Dial is drawn to scale whatever size you need. It listens for scrolling of the mouse wheel. Other classes can subscribe to get ActionEvents when the dial moves. This way the dial is loosely coupled and can be reused all over the place. For example,

Angle Driving

Using the dial I built a panel that is initialized with a virtual sixi3 robot.

The radio buttons on the left are pulled from the robot model. The AngleDriving system listens to the dial. When the Dial moves then AngleDriving looks at the selected button, finds the robot joint, and tweaks it by 1 degree.

Cartesian Driving

Moving the arm one joint at a time is fine some of the time, but sometimes I need to move in a straight line. I improved the look of the Dial a little bit and made this tool to move the end effector (finger tip) of the robot arm.

XYZ are straight line moves. Roll is a twist around Z, pitch a twist around X, and yaw a twist around Y. Each of these moves happens relative to the reference frame. The options for now are world, the first joint of the robot, and the end effector itself.

Read-only panels

Once I had that I needed more ways to visualize what the system was doing. The two types I made are the AngleReportPanel,

And the various matrix reports.

Each of these listens to the robot reporting a change to the end effector position.

Cartesian Driving with Jacobians

Big shout out to https://akintokinematics.com/ for the excellent Jupyter notebooks that helped me improve cartesian driving to work. For some time now I’ve been telling everyone how much I love Gradient Descent for moving the robot arm. Well… it turns out Gradient Descent is hard to tune and slow AF to converge on a solution, sometimes taking 30 seconds per millimeter. So, instead, based on Greer’s notes, I used the approximate Jacobian.

The approximate Jacobian is a matrix describing the relationship between joint velocity and cartesian velocity at a position. So from position A to position B have the cartesian difference {x,y,z,roll,pitch,yaw}, dAB.

  • I get the approximate Jacobian at A, aj.
  • I get the inverse or pseudoinverse of the Jacobian, aji,
  • Multiply aji * dAB to get is the amount to move each joint in the arm.
  • Apply the joint change and measure the error term.

I set up a loop to run (at most) 20 times. In practical terms it never seems to run more than 2 or 3 per step, and feels blazing fast.

Putting it all together

If you run the development version of Robot Overlord today and use Demos > Sixi 3 you’ll get this view and be able to drive the virtual robot by playing with the controls. Tweaking the dials moves the virtual robot. Sixi 3 UI listens for those changes and sends them through the RobotUI.chatInterface so they show up in the history and they move the real machine (if connected).

My next Thing is figuring out a nice way to run programs: loops, sequences, patterns, wait for signal, send signal, conditionals, and so on. The virtual robot does not know anything about gcode and my gut says it would be a really big mess to spread gcode around the app. I would love to jazz with you about this and find a Good Way to achieve the Thing.

Robot Arm Tutorials

How to make your robot arm talk to Robot Overlord

Robot Overlord already simulates and drives robot arms. If you are building a new robot arm, it only makes sense to work with Robot Overlord and get the job done faster. Here’s a few tips to get you going faster.

The medium is the message

Robot Overlord can open a serial connection at your chosen baud rate 8-N-1 style. All Robot Overlord commands are less than 64 bytes long and all of them end with a new line (\n) character.

The syntax

Rather than write a long post that might get out date, here’s a link to the Robot Overlord Wiki page with the current syntax and formatting rules.

https://github.com/MarginallyClever/Robot-Overlord-App/wiki/GCODE

Note that this list isn’t the canonical list, either – the real deal is in the firmware for the Sixi robot, as that is the robot we currently write to support. In the future and this is out of date, let me know!

Of course talking to the app isn’t enough. You’ll also want to add a model of your arm to Robot Overlord so that the kinematics are correct.

As always we have helpful forums where you can get help with your robot project.