6 posts tagged with "ros2"

How are complex robot arm motions actually planned and executed? Robot arms are usually mounted within an enclosure or with some kind of environment that restricts their movement, and their task is rarely as simple as picking a simple object from above. How can we plan arm movements that avoid colliding with anything and reliably accomplish their tasks? There's more than one answer, of course, but one excellent answer is to use MoveIt.

MoveIt is a powerful and widely used framework for motion planning in robotics. It helps robots figure out how to get from one point to another while avoiding obstacles, respecting joint limits, and following physical constraints.

In this post, I'll go through the tutorials available from the MoveIt website for MoveIt 2. I have a few notes to add for the first few tutorials, but the majority of my focus is on the final tutorial, Pick and Place with MoveIt Task Constructor. I'll explain more about how it works and the underlying principles so you can get started building your own task set for MoveIt.

This post is also available in video form. I work through all the tutorials on camera so you can see every step. If you'd prefer to watch, click the link below:

Moving and manipulating objects are one of the most common tasks in robotics. Examples include moving objects, folding clothes, or solving Rubik's cubes. Robots that perform these tasks are often called manipulators, and they tend to be arms with some kind of gripper on the end - in my experience, a pinch or suction gripper.

One method of controlling the movement of a robot arm to a given pose is using ros2_control. By using this framework, we can use existing robot controllers for moving motors, and we even gain access to advanced behaviour like incorporating feedback into a PID control loop to more accurately position our arm. This post is all about how to control a simulated robot arm with 6 joints, using the sample code from the ROS 2 Controller Examples.

This post is also available in video form. If you'd prefer to watch, click the link below:

This post shows how to use ROS 2 to control the CamJam EduKit #3. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which is a small development board with minimal compute power. However, the Pi Zero can still run a full Linux Operating System, which makes it a great entry point into building your own cost-effective robot. All instructions should be applicable to more powerful Raspberry Pi models, such as the 4 or 5 models.

The CamJam EduKit #3 is a cheap robot kit you can use to build your robot. I have a series of videos on YouTube of how to assemble and run the kit, and a blog post that will tell you what each video is for. It comes with a series of worksheets to get to following a line course or avoiding obstacles; this post aims to combine the line following with obstacle avoidance, while using ROS 2 to read the sensors and move the robot.

This post is also available in video form. If you'd prefer to watch, click the link below:

Many of the blogs on this site and the videos on my YouTube channel make use of ROS 2, but I have yet to describe what ROS 2 is or why it's worth taking the time to learn. This article is an entry level post on what ROS 2 is, the basic concepts, and why you might want to learn it.

If you'd prefer to see this post in video form, please check the following link for the YouTube video:

If you want a cheap robot kit, it's hard to do better than the CamJam EduKit #3. This is a small kit which you can assemble into a two-wheeled robot with a caster, as long as you buy a few extras. It comes with a line sensor and ultrasound distance sensor, plus a series of exercise sheets to work through in order to build the robot and get it running. You can optionally get your own chassis, or you can use the box the kit comes in.

I have recorded videos that cover all of the exercises given by the repository and uploaded them to YouTube. This post goes through each video and briefly explains what it shows, so you can follow along if you choose to buy the kit. I also use the box as the chassis!

This is the second part of the "ROS2 Control with the JetBot" series, where I show you how to get a JetBot working with ROS2 Control! This is a sequel to the part 1 blog post, where I showed how to drive the JetBot's motors using I²C and PWM with code written in C++.

In this post, I show the next step in making ROS2 Control work with the WaveShare JetBot - wrapping the motor control code in a System. I'll walk through some concepts, show the example repository for ROS2 Control implementations, and then show how to implement the System for JetBot and see it running.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!