Tekkotsu Planar Hand-Eye System
An affordable way to teach manipulation, robot vision, human-robot interaction, and more.
- Three degree-of-freedom planar arm.
- Logitech Pro 9000 webcam on a pan/tilt mount.
- USB interface.
Demo Programs
These demo programs are part of the Tekkotsu source tree and can be found in Tekkotsu/Behaviors/Demos/HandEye.- CameraTrackGripper.h demonstrates use of forward and inverse kinematics solvers. It relaxes the arm so the user can gently move it around, uses forward kinematics to claculate the gripper position in body coordinates, and uses the lookAtPoint function (an inverse kinematics solver) to keep the camera centered on the gripper.
- ArmTrackObject.h.fsm uses the MapBuilder to find elliptical objects, and the IK solver to move the gripper to the location of the largest ellipse. This repeats every two seconds, so the arm will track an easter egg that the user pushes around the table.
Towers of Hanoi Project from RPI
Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are using three hand-eye systems in their spring 2009 Cognitive Robotics course, taught by Professor Bram Van Heuveln. Evan Patton and Michel Brudzinski created a Tekkotsu/ACT-R interface that allowed ACT-R to solve Towers of Hanoi using a real robotic arm. See the project web page for more information. RPI doctoral student Michel Brudzinski demonstrating the Tower of Hanoi solver he and undergraduate Evan Patton developed as a final project in their cognitive robotics course. |
 Close-up view of the hand-eye system moving one of the Tower of Hanoi pieces. These photos were taken during a robot demonstration at the Schenectady Museum. |
New: Optional Gripper With Closable Fingers
