Thursday, September 21, 2006

Improving R2D3


My R2D3 Project was supposed to be a blender/python based General Purpose Robotic Development Environment. Sadly enough all it does at the present moment is the following -
  1. Simulate Forward/Inverse Kinematics and ACL Interpretation for a specific proprietary 5DOF Robotic Arm (Scorbot Er5, which was used in my college Robotics Lab).
  2. Look Pretty (and that's Blender's handywork, not mine).
The simulation, though working well, is somewhat limited in its capabilities -
  1. The ACL Interpreter acccepts only a subset of ACL commandset.
  2. The ACL Editor is vaporware.
  3. Dynamics is not supported.
Other planned subparts are not even functional -
  1. Controlling the actual robot via serial communication with an ACL Controller.
  2. Server for accepting commands over a network connection.
Also when I started the project I was just learning Blender and Python so the quality of code needs improvement.

Therefore I plan to do the following -
  1. Modularise R2D3.py into generic and robot specific functionalities.
  2. Add code to enable assembly of any kind of Robot.
  3. Complete the Server for accepting commands over a server.
I hope to see this project bundled with Blender someday :)

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