Use of MSRS in manipulation and control ...

The Robotics Research Group (RRG) at University of Texas at Austin is dedicated to the advancement of open architecture intelligent machine technology with a primary focus on robotics.

In this lab  Dr. Chetan Kapoor, Director/Chief Scientist and Andrew Spencer have been using Microsoft Robotics Studio to develop and demonstrate a Win XP and Win CE based robot arm controller that implements real-time trajectorygeneration, kinematic control, redundancy resolution and tele-operation with input scaling to guide an operator.

The heart of the controller is the motion planner, which is built from the generalized robot control libraries developed at the RRG, called OSCAR (Operational Software Components for Advanced Robotics).

The system consists of sensing, actuation, simulation, motion planning, input device and safety monitoring modules which are implemented as MSRS Services. The hardware used is the Schunk LWA3 seven degree of freedom manipulator, being controlled through a CAN-Bus interface through either PCI or USB.

More details on individual services, controller architecture and the manipulator hardware and be found here.

The video shows the system under real-time control, performing point to point joint interpolated and Cartesian moves. It also shows under teleoperation using the Xbox controller. The teleoperation is implemented using the jogging capability provided in the motion planner service.

Thanks

Joseph Fernando