6-DOF Serial Link Robotic Manipulator

A project for ROB 550: Robotics Systems Lab course taught in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An overview of this project:

Acting

• 6-DOF rigid-body coordinate transforms using homogeneous coordinate transforms
• Forward kinematics modeling of a manipulator
• Inverse kinematics modeling of a manipulator
• Grasping

Perception

• 3D image/workspace calibration
• Object detection with OpenCV
• Depth camera sensors

Reasoning

• Path planning & path smoothing
• State machines

The whole pipeline can be explained by the following figure:

Running the code

1. ./control_station
2. freenect-cppview -- run this program and make sure the kinect is streaming both video and depth data

Directories and Codebase

Files	Description
control_station.py	Main program. Sets up threads and callback functions.
rexarm.py	Implements the Rexarm and Joint class
test/test_rexarm.py	Script to verify FK and IK and test functions in the rexarm class without being connected to the rexarm.
config/rexarm_config.csv	This file is used to configure your rexarm links.
kinect.py	Implements Kinect class. This class contains: functions to capture and convert frames functions to load camera calibration data functions to find and perform 2D transforms functions to perform world->cam and cam->world transforms functions to detect blocks in the depth and rgb frames
test/test_kinect.py	Script to test out computer vision code without being connected to the rexarm and the control_station.py GUI.
test/test_gripper.py	Script to test the gripper functionality without loading the GUI.
state_machine.py	Implements the StateMachine class
trajectory_planner.py	Implements the TrajectoryPlanner class
kinematics.py	Implements functions for forward and inverse kinematics.
armlab_gui.ui	This file defines the GUI interface, created using QtCreator. To compile a new ui.py file run, pyuic4 mainWindow.ui -o ui.py
ui.py	Output from QtCreator with GUI implementation in Python.
utils/camera_cal.py	Standalone program to generate camera distortion parameters and camera intrinsic matrix after calibrating with a checkerboard.

Lab setup

Teach 'n Play (on an Operations board)

Collaborators

Saptadeep Debnath, Pradeep Suresh and Yuping Wang.