Let's talk about robots

Intro

The objective of this website is purely academic.
I would like to create a place where I can show the open source code, libraries, tutorials, websites, and in general, useful information that I used on the projects that I have been working on.
There is so much information on the internet and great places and websites to learn about robotics without spend any money.
Today we are able to make the whole process of building a robot from home.
We have the Robot Operating System (ROS) with libraries and tools to build our robot aplication, we can design and test our own robots with Gazebo, or use models already implemented, we can use Arduino hardware and the great amount of tutorials and code to build them physically.

Projects

amigoBot

The amigobot was the first contact I had with a real robot. This is a mobile robot used for educational and research tasks. It was really useful to learn sensor fusion from the ultrasonic and laser sensors.
Vector Field Histogram (VFH) was one of the first motion planning algorithms that I tested. It was a fast and robust algorithm based on Histogram grid that allow to compute the real world based on the statistical representation of the obstacles collected from the sensor readings.

Valkyrie

I worked on this project during my last stage in the university, in a research project under supervision of Dr Manuel Ocaña. We collaborated with Edinburgh University who provided us with videos of different behaviours of the Valkyrie. I based my project on the detection and identification of movements of the robot based on Point Cloud Library (PCL) . I made a comparation with some segmentation algorithms of the library to find which of them could be better to do this task. I also used OpenCV for object tracking. I found this really useful not just for objects, it is also possible to recognise faces using the same library, and recognise differnet people in one scene.

AGV

This project has been the most complex one I have been working with. The goal of the AGV was to reach the autonomous navigation on an industrial environemnt. I implemented the local navigation system with TEB_LOCAL_PLANNER. This allows it to work with dynamic environments with features such as obstacle avoidance with static and dynamic obstacles (with a constant velocity). I used 4 IntelRealsense D435i cameras to detect the obstacles.
Startracker was the technology used as a global navigation which was really accurate for indoor environments (in order to 1 mm).
GPS was used as the global navigation for outdoor environments and a switch beetween this and StarTracker was implemented when the AGV was moving from inside to outside, and when reversing. The outdoor GPS navigation with centimeter precision was done using Real-time kinematic positioning (RTK) via Base-Rover configuration over Radio or via NTRIP caster.
The kinematic model was a tricycle, using a TZ09 motor working at 48V with two encoders, one on the motor and another on the steering gear wheel, which has much higher accurancy. This one is a brushless DC electric motor (BLDC) and it has easy maintenance.
Modbus RS485 was the protocol used to communicate with the encoders.
Another interesting feature I used was Arduino. I needed a way to comunicate the actuators (which did not have a hardware interface) with ROS. For that I connect those to a H-bridge L298N and this one to an Arduino, which was connected to ROS (on a NUC). The protocol used for this communication was the rosserial_arduino protocol that allowed me to write a program that turn off and on the actuators depending of the AGV possition knowing for ROS.

Robotic arm

I have been working with this robotic arm from HAN'S ROBOT company which we used to automatize the process of testing the behaviur of some devices for long periods of time. The arm has its own interface where you can program different movements, record them and then execute them automatically.
It is possible to use ROS and one useful package for that is moveIt .

About

My name is Adrián Campos, I was born in Madrid in 1995. Almost three years ago I started my professional career in London, with the aim of leaving my comfort area.
Almost two years ago I started working in a company where I have been responsible for full lifecycle development of software for the early stages of an AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicle), for example design, coding, testing, documentation and implementation.
This has been a period of great growth and many challenges that have helped me to accelerate my career and develop new skills.

Contact

For any questions, please contact with me on Linkedin :)

• Linkedin

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