As part of the University of Leeds’ annual public engagement event Be Curious, we formed a team of PGRs to bring a hands-on robotics experience to families in the Leeds area. The focus was on robot sensing and human robot collaboration - as part of this, we used a couple of Turtlebots as a demo of some SLAM techniques, and I took on the programming of a PincherX robot arm which was mounted on a table.

We’re running an in-person Summer module as part of the Leeds International Summer School. The module will be delivered over a 2 week period, covering topics including

• History of shell structures
• Parametric design with Grasshopper
• Shell structure form finding techniques and algorithms
• Tesselation and planarisation for panelling
• Connection systems
• Design for digital fabrication

I kept seeing PSO being used in papers to minimise paths for manipulators, so I wrote a quick toy script to test it out. Here’s the results with a Sphere function:

PSO with 5 particles acting on a sphere function landscape.

Following the procedure of (Zacharias et. al, 2007: Capturing robot workspace structure: representing robot capabilities), I have been studying the use of reachability mappings of manipulator workspaces. Using inverse kinematic (IK) solvers for a kinematic chain specific to an available manipulator setup, a number of orientations about positions on a discretised grid can be tested to be reachable. A scoring is then assigned to each position by the percentage of orientations that are achievable at that voxel location.

Defining geometries in CAD and sending via ROS2 middleware.