Maxwell Wins at AAAI

12 Aug 2011 maxwell  robots  Maxwell won 1st place in the 2011 AAAI Small Scale Manipulation Challenge! Video and photos soon video soon.

ROSSerial Released

22 Jul 2011 ros  My first project of the summer here at Willow is now in release: rosserial. (It was actually released about 2 weeks ago).

This is a new library for connecting the Arduino platform to ROS, allowing an Arduino to directly publish and subscribe to ROS messages. There are also demos ranging from controlling servos to using an Arduino and rxplot as an oscilloscope to reading temperature sensors into ROS.

In addition to support integration with the Arduino platform, the rosserial library provides a general point-to-point transport for ROS communication over serial, which is intended for hardware that cannot support the full ROS TCP/IP network stack. This library can be used to easily integrate a wide-variety of low-cost hardware into ROS.

Debian packages are now available for diamondback and unstable (shortly electric).

See more at: http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosserial.

A New Gripper for Mini Max

01 Jul 2011 3d-printing  robots  ros  I was never satisfied with the simple gripper we had put on the Mini Maxwell prototypes. It took a bit of time to actually sit down and create the gripper I wanted, but I've now printed up a couple prototypes:
The design was done in Autodesk Inventor:
There is a simple mechanism for converting the motion of a single AX-12 to parallel motion for both jaws: