armBOT System Integration and Assembly

Controlling the robot remotely requires us to use services which can capture our commands, and then at the same time, relay them to the receiver’s end. 

The whole process requires :

• hardware to connect to the internet on receiver and transmitter end
• service to allow the hardware to send the commands

You can learn more on the topic by visiting the link here.

Apart from the physical structure, a robot arm comprises of algorithms which actually tells it what to do and how. 

Robotic Operating System( ROS) provides us with a set of tools and frameworks to model our test environment and robot in a virtual setting and determine the consequences of different algorithms on the system as per our need. 

To get up to speed on ROS from the basics, feel free to browse through the link .

Once you are comfortable with ROS environment, jump on here , to learn on controlling your armBOT using ROS.

In order to make the robot autonomous, we need to make sure it can somehow map the surrounding space. One way of doing so it equipping it with vision capabilities and a camera can be used for our case in armBOT.

The field of AI which allows the algorithms to identify/detect the obejcts is called computer vision (CV). Click here, to get started with CV examples. 

You might wish to install the required softwares like Anaconda before starting. Learn more about the steps, here, under the “Machine Learning tab”.

Till now we mostly discussed about the software side of the work. But to move the robot physically, we would need small computers which can take the sensor data, do limited processing( wherever required), and relay the output to the sensors and actuators based on the code. 

In armBOT v1.0 and v1.1, the primary microcontroller used has been Arduino Uno. To get started with it, kindly follow the exercises and example using alphaBOT, here. 

Other microcontrollers used or of consideration are:

• ESP8266
• ESP32
• Particle Argon and Xenon

Learn more about them, here.