Final project description: "Building towards Robotic Sculpting" - Mauricio Contreras

Building towards Robotic Sculpting

I'm exploring gestural control with haptic feedback in driving an industrial robotic arm to enable human driven sculpting. In the final showing I'll demo different techniques I've been using and applying to the robotic arm, in a smaller format, controlling a desktop drilling tool.

Tech description:

I'm using an Android smartphone as controller; it's orientation drives the z axis motion of a small drill press (Dremel + stand rather). It is also a haptic feedback device in the sense that, upon the head of the tool drawing near to the material being drilled, the smartphone vibrates. The programing of the smartphone is in Java, writing in a TCP/IP socket (wirelessly) to a PC, which in turn does serial to an Arduino driving the servo motor that moves the tool in the vertical axis. The distance sensor communicates to another microcontroller and then to the same software running in the PC, which writes to the socket sending the vibration signal, closing the feedback loop.

Acknowledgements

Dale Clifford
Zack Jacobson-Weaver
Madeline Gannon
Ali Momeni
Mike Jeffers
Golan Levin
Garth Zegling
and CMU’s Manipulation Lab

without your valuable support and honest critique, this project would be nothing.

Video (v1)