Twinbotics

Inspiration

Our inspiration behind this project were Amazon's cooperative warehouse robots, and the recent NASA efforts towards the Artemis project. We wanted to emulate the cooperative nature of Amazon's robotic arms in a context similar to the Artemis mission.

What it does

It's a pair of twin arms that can communicate with each other to jointly complete complex tasks. Each arm individually is capable of completing simulated space missions like stacking and unloading crates from ships.

How we built it

We focused on each arm separately and based our arm design on an open-sourced model called EEZYbotARM. We derived inverse kinematic equations to accurately position each arm in 3D space. We also used path planning and motion profiling to create smooth trajectories that are guaranteed to not intersect with other arms. During cooperative tasks, each arm can signal to the other to begin or pause execution of a subtask.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was powering both arms simultaneously. Running all actuators at once risked exceeding our current limits. We had to design our electronics around this constraint. Another significant challenge was coordinating between two robots. To simplify this process, we provided the ability for both robots to operate in the same shared global pane.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our robot was able to reliably move and stack crates many times in a row.

What we learned

Directly programming the embedded controllers can be more efficient than offloading decision making to a secondary processor. Many of our initial issues were resolved when we transferred more of our key functionality from a host laptop to each individual microprocessor.