Project:Kinect Robotic Arm

Goals

The idea here is to have an intelligent Robot Arm that is able to find and pick objects, not using a pre-determined sequence of steps nor some kind of remote control, but instead use Kinect sensor to find the objects to pick.

Later one could add some wheels to it - with a mobile platform, this would in fact be converted into an autonomous robot. The Kinect would also be used to detect and avoid obstacles - No more sensors should be needed.

In terms of usefulness, although it doesn't really have to be useful, as it is so cool, it could be used to pick lego parts that might be spread on the floor and put them into a box.

Hardware

Robot Arm Kit - 6 DOF

(includes the SSC32 Servo Controller)

Kinect (PC Version)
Arduino Uno
Raspberry Pi

Kinect

This is a special version of Kinect - it has a "Near Mode" that allows to see objects as close as 40 centimeters (the normal Kinect only sees objects from 80 centimeters)

The Arm

With 6 degrees of freedom it's very flexible.

The Servo Controller

It allows to control up to 32 servos, so, one has plenty of room for aditional developments.

Raspberry Pi

With the ARM11 processor 700Mhz, 512Mb RAM running Linux, there's plenty of processing power to analyse the Kinect depth data.

Problems & Challenges

Having the arduino connected to the arm's servos using the SSC32 controler shouldn't be too dificult as this controller is prepared to integrate with Arduino.

The Kinect would be connected the Raspberry Pi, as there is no drivers of Kinect for Arduino, but there is something called "OpenKinect" that allows to communicate with Kinect from Linux, and one can't install Linux in Arduino. One might ask why to have an Arduino, and not connect the Raspberry Pi directly to the servo controller? It might be possible, but one only has documentation on how to connect the server controller to Arduino ...

Eventually one might be able to control the Kinect with Arduino without using OpenKinect ...

The most difficult part will be to analyse the raw data that comes from Kinect and get some meaning out of it...

Resources

Comments & Suggestions

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