Hacksmith Robotics in Collaboration with Waterloo RoboHub

This project’s aim is to develop the Piper robot arm as an effective ‘cobot’, developing point tracking, manual control, and teach & repeat capabilities with a variety of different end effectors.
This will take the form of tracking ZeroKey position sensors with a camera or lamp, control with a game controller / keyboard / other 6 dof position control device and will utilize grippers, cameras, probes, and lamps as end effectors.
Further, we will investigate the possibility of enhancing the capabilities of the arm using the Gemini AI for robotics.

The arm should exhibit the desired behavior, i.e. tracking.
This will be done by commanding the end effector position of the arm depending on the position of the target of tracking. For manual control modes some combination of moving individual joints vs. changing the end effector position directly will be explored for whatever is the most intuitive control
The arm should be able to track and move smoothly between states when commanded.
This will be done in the form of motion planning and a control loop on the arm commands in order to achieve the desired behavior (such as maintaining a flat roll angle when in camera tracking mode).
The arm should be reliably operational remotely.
A device on the arm will launch some form of local network webpage that an operator can connect to from another device and then command and control the arm through that interface to allow the arm to function as a standalone device.

Faculty Supervisor:

Brandon DeHart;William Melek

Student:

Partner:

Hacksmith Industries

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

University of Waterloo

Program: