Infi-Zeal's Blog

Calculating the forward kinematics is often a vital first step to using a new robot in research. While there are some good tutorials available online, up until now there hasn’t been a simple step-by-step guide for calculating forward kinematics. In this post, we provide a simple guide along with some tips on calculating the kinematics of any robotic manipulator. Calculating kinematics is a cornerstone skill for robotics engineers.  Kinematics can sometimes be a pain, however, being told to “go and calculate the Forward Kinematics” is almost robotics research shorthand for “go and get familiar with this robot”. It’s the vital first step when using any new robot in research, particularly for manipulators. Even though I had learned the theory of kinematics in university, it wasn’t until I had calculated various kinematic solutions for a few real research robots that the whole process started to feel intuitive. Even then, because I was not calculating kinematics e...

Mining for resources hidden under the surface of the earth has never been a job devoid of hazards. You can start with the fact the it’s under the earth, and there’s no natural light, and the spaces can get tiny so it’s clearly not a job even for the mildly claustrophobic. Then there’s the danger of cave-ins that do happen even with all the modern marvels that we have access to thanks to advances in structural engineering. When it comes to coal mining, however, the danger is several times greater due to added danger of highly flammable gases in certain parts. Other than the Japanese using them for what basically amounts to some amusing (robotic pets), and some disconcerting (robots that look like creepy versions of children or grown women, etc) toys, the use of robotic technology has almost overwhelmingly been either to go where man hasn’t or cannot go, or in some other cases to augment human ability to do what was hitherto very difficult. We have robotic rover vehicles landing on...

At  IROS last month , researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it. We wanted to write about it immediately, but Deepfield asked us to hold off a bit until their fancy new website went live, which it now has. This means that we can show you video of their enormous agricultural robot that can autonomously detect and physically obliterate individual weeds in a tenth of a second. The stamping tool is 1 centimeter wide, and it drives weeds about 3 cm into the soil. It’s designed to detect (through leaf shape) and destroy small weeds that have just sprouted, although for larger weeds, it can hammer them multiple times in a row with a cycle time of under 100 ms. Testing on a real carrot crop, which has carrots spaced about 2 cm apart and an average of 20 weeds per meter growing very close to the ca...

Step 1: Extract the Wii IR camera You'll need a Wii remote or "Wiimote" to start with. Normally they are about $40, in the end that is not too bad for a pretty awesome sensor. Otherwise you can check out ebay or elsewhere for used or broken Wii remotes. You'll need to rip apart the case. It has some crazy three pronged screws. I didn't want to completely trash the case so I made a small tool to take it apart. Now you need to desolder the 8 pins and the 2 struts holding the camera on the board. I used some desoldering braid. It wicks the solder away and makes it easy to get the camera out. Be careful, don't break the camera! You might want to keep the rest of the parts. You might be able to scrap other parts. Also, If you decide later to use the Wiimote again, you could always put the camera back in. Step 2: Interface Circuitry We'll need a small circuit to interface the IR camera to the arduino. I got all m...

As it is stated in previous post that we aren’t going to start will all those repeating basic programs but still here are some most important commands that will be used throughout our tutorial series. Serial.println(value); Prints the value to the Serial Monitor on your computer pinMode(pin, mode); Configures a digital pin to read (input) or write (output) a digital value digitalRead(pin); Reads a digital value (HIGH or LOW) on a pin set for input digitalWrite(pin, value); Writes the digital value (HIGH or LOW) to a pin set for output Now all of you know how to turn on a led using arduino. But if I want to use decimal number for our program then. We will use float number, here suppose we want to add some decimal numbers and want to print them. float value = 1.1; void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); // open the serial port to send data back to the computer at  9600 bits per //second } void loop() { value = value + 0.1;  // increase...