Cyberbotics Ltd. is launching https://robotbenchmark.net to allow everyone to program simulated robots online for free.
by Nicholas Charron
The need for fast, accurate 3D mapping solutions has quickly become a reality for many industries wanting to adopt new technologies in AI and automation. New applications requiring these 3D mapping platforms include surveillance, mining, automated measurement & inspection, construction management & decommissioning, and photo-realistic rendering. Here at Clearpath Robotics, we decided to team up with Mandala Robotics to show how easily you can implement 3D mapping on a Clearpath robot.
By Tully Foote
We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing software and libraries. The vehicle’s throttle, brake, steering, and transmission are controlled by publishing to a ROS topic. All sensor data is published using ROS, and can be visualized with RViz.
The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free.
The lessons were created in 2015 for the Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. We describe our approach to creating the original courses in the article, An Innovative Educational Change: Massive Open Online Courses in Robotics and Robotic Vision. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody, as you can easily see the difficulty rating for each lesson. Below are lessons from inverse kinematics and robot motion.
You probably know the Sphero robot. It is a small robot with the shape of a ball. In case that you have one, you must know that it is possible to control it using ROS, by installing in your computer the Sphero ROS packages developed by Melonee Wise and connecting to the robot using the bluetooth of the computer.
This handy video-tutorial course gives an introduction to the Robot Operating System (ROS), including many of the available tools that are commonly used in robotics. With the help of different examples, the tutorials offer a great starting point to learn programming robots. You will learn how to create software including simulation, to interface sensors and actuators, and to integrate control algorithms.
So – you’ve built a robot arm. Now you’ve got to figure out how to control the thing. This was the situation I found myself in a few months ago, during my Masters project, and it’s a problem common to any robotic application: you want to put the end (specifically, the “end effector”) of your robot arm in a certain place, and to do that you have to figure out a valid pose for the arm which achieves that. This problem is called inverse kinematics (IK), and it’s one of the key problems in robotics.
Gabby has five goals to achieve this school year. The first goal sounds like any other young middle schooler: get straight As in her classes. Goal number two: get accepted into her school’s robotics team, followed closely by number three: to own her first VEX IQ Robotics kit. That’s when you may realize, Gabby is an extraordinary middle schooler!
August 6, 2018
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