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Developments from 2023-2024

This year development is focused around expanding and updating the software areas of our current hardware setup, with a new project based on the development of a custom omnidirectional mobile base.

Electronics and Control

  • Started development of PCBs for the omnidirectional mobile base.
  • Standardized the electronics of the main robot for full 24V operation.

Mechanics

  • Started development of the omnidirectional mobile base, with an octagonal shape and 4 omnidirectional wheels.
  • Designed and started manufacturing of several new grippers.
  • Redesigned the electronics protections for the Dashgo and Xarm6.

Human Robot Interaction

Speech Recognition

  • Developed a ROS node for speech recognition using Whisper, replacing our online solution from Azure.

Action Interpretation

  • Developed custom fine tuned GPT-3.5 model for action interpretation, with emphasis on a more flexible and human-like interpretation of voice commands.

Robot Interface

  • Developed a ROS Node for continuous arm movement to follow the user, enhancing the robot's interaction capabilities.
  • Installed and started development on an on-robot tablet for user interaction, including RVIZ and camera visualization and a custom interface for the robot's services.

Integration and Networks

ROS

  • Replaced a previous web socket solution for communicating two roscores with a multimaster solution, allowing for more robust and faster communication between the robot software modules.
  • Started development of ROS2 migration.

Computer Vision

Human Recognition

  • Replaced DeepFace for face_recognition from dlib, allowing for faster and more accurate face recognition.
  • Developed a custom human attribute recognition using the PETA dataset.

Object Detection

  • Migrated to Yolov8 for object detection.
  • Increased adaptability and ease of use of the automated dataset generation method.
  • Started development of a custom dataset generation tool based on 3D scanning.

Dashgo B1 mobile base

  • Developed a node for fusing LIDAR and on-arm depth camera for better obstacle avoidance.
  • Started work on a person follower node integrating SLAM for navigation on unknown environments.

Omnidirectional Mobile Base

  • Started development of the omnidirectional mobile base, with a custom ROS node for control and odometry.
  • Integrated Hector SLAM for mapping and localization.

Manipulation

Planning and Hardware

  • Replaced Xarm5 for a Xarm6, as well as designed new custom grippers.
  • Migrated the planning and arm control computation to the Jetson AGX Xavier, for stable compute times and a more reliable ethernet-based communication with the arm.
  • Started a migration from MoveIt planning to faster alternatives.

Pick and Place

  • Increased accuracy and stability of the pick process.
  • Developed two place methods, one with a graph based approach and another using clustering for identifying possible placing areas.