Month: April 2019

Niryo Arm Motor Troubleshooting

In most development processes hiccups are unavoidable. Our grasping application using the Niryo One arm was no exception. During testing, we had two of our arms break down and with this post, we would like to share our experiences with debugging and resolving these issues.

As far as we can understand, the axis 6 motor (Dynamixel XL-320 model) in the first arm, which is responsible for turning the gripper around, was damaged due to the gripper hitting the table. Since the gripper does not have an applied force feedback shutdown procedure, one of the motors probably broke down from overloading. Note that there is no gripper URDF model provided and octomap integration into the project was not yet complete at the time, so the kinematics planner was not aware of the table’s existence. As for our second arm, the culprit was the power adapter. The Dynamixel XL-430 motors are rated for 11.1 Volts, but the adapter supplied is a 12V one, which can cause permanent damage due to overheating if the arm is operating for prolonged periods of time. This design oversight was amended in Niryo One models shipped after November 2018, but in any case, you should check the rating of the power adapter provided and request a replacement if needed.

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First Robotics and ROS in Zürich Meetup

ICCLab organized the first robotics and ROS meetup in Zürich on April 9th 2019. There was a good turnout from representatives in both academia and industry, totaling almost 60 people in attendance. This meetup is the first of hopefully many that we intend to organize, as part of our effort to build a local network of ROS users across many robotic disciplines. Besides networking, our goal for these meetups is to also provide a platform for individuals to share and teach specific robotics/ROS knowledge. For this initial meetup we had two presentations: vision for navigation in autonomous robotics, and ROS applications at ICCLab.

Nearly 60 attendees were present at the first robotics and ROS in Zürich meetup.
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Running the ICCLab ROS Kinetic environment on your own laptop

As we are making progress on the development of robotic applications in our lab, we experience benefits from providing an easy-to-deploy common ROS Kinetic environment for our developers so that there is no initial setup time needed before starting working on the real code. At the same time, any interested users that would like to test and navigate our code implementations could do this with a few commands. One git clone command is now enough to download our up-to-date repository to your local computer and run our ROS kinetic environment including a workspace with the current ROS projects.

To reach this goal we created a container that includes the ROS Kinetic distribution, all needed dependencies and software packages needed for our projects. No additional installation or configuration steps are needed before testing our applications. The git repository of reference can be found at this link: https://github.com/icclab/rosdocked-irlab

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