Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk
17 hours ago
- #Open-Source Hardware
- #Robotics Research
- #DIY Robotics
- Robotics research is now accessible to small teams or individuals due to affordable industrial-grade hardware and publicly available foundation models.
- A physical setup including an industrial robot arm, two cameras, and teleoperation costs under €5,000, enabling desk-side experimentation.
- The author built a custom software stack from scratch for control, sensing, teleoperation, and data recording, prioritizing flexibility and full-stack understanding over existing frameworks like ROS 2.
- Key components include a UFACTORY xArm Lite 6 robot arm, Intel RealSense D405 wrist camera, Logitech C920 static camera, and a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse for teleoperation.
- Software architecture uses a pub/sub event bus within a single Python process, with services for sensing, control, telemetry, and data recording, ensuring modularity and safety.
- Safety measures include hardware emergency stops, software clipping of motion commands, input expiration, and fail-loud process design to prevent accidents.
- Future plans involve collecting demonstration datasets, training baseline policies, and experimenting with zero-shot deployment of vision-language-action models for tabletop manipulation tasks.