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How to add a new robot arm

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Dan Royer edited this page Jun 9, 2023 · 11 revisions

Setup

image

  • run Robot Overlord.
  • In the top-right Entity Manager, click on Scene and then the + above.
  • Select the new Entity. We will refer to this as the robot's Root Entity.
  • in the bottom-right Component Manager, click on + and add a RobotComponent. Some additional required Components will automatically be added.
  • in the Component Manager, scroll down to the RobotComponent. Click Edit Arm. A new window will appear.

Edit Arm panel

image

# Joints: the number of joints in this robot arm. Texture: a quick way to set a single texture file for the entire robot. File: the 3d mesh for the base of the robot arm. Show DH: when selected, will illustrate the DH parameters in the 3D view. All meshes...: Do not select this if your meshes have origins at their axis of rotation.

The table then has # Joints rows with the following values:

  • Max, Min: The joint range limits. All values should be within -360 and +360. All joints are assumed to be revolute joints, not prismatic.
  • Home: The value of theta when the robot "goes home".
  • Mesh: The 3d mesh for this joint of the robot arm.
  • D, R, Alpha, Theta: DH parameters. Theta should be the angle of the arm in your design. During normal operation Theta cannot be set outside the max/min limits. It is best if you set the max/min before setting theta.

Share your robot with everyone

  • create a new github project
  • remove any non-essential items from your scene including floor and Main Camera.
  • save your project to $USERPATH/RobotOverlord/Scene.
  • copy the contents of $USERPATH/RobotOverlord/Scene to your gibhub project folder.
  • undo to restore your non-essentials.
  • in our gibhub project folder add a robot.properties file that follows the robot library specification 
name=[your robot name]
version=1.0.0
author=[your name]
maintainer=[your name] <[your email]>
sentence=[one sentence description]
paragraph=[longer description appears after one sentence]
image_url=[128x128 image]
url=[your website or the github url]

Your robot will be available to everyone once the master list is updated. Congratulations!

Notes

  • When the panel is opened several new Entities and Components are added to the robot's Root Entity if they are not detected.
  • Robot Overlord measures everything in centimeters, so if your model is 10x too large, you may be exporting in mm. If it is 2.54x too large, you are exporting in inches. Please use Blender or some other program to resize your models.
  • if you lower the number of joints the builder will not remove the extra Entities and Components.

last reviewed version: 2.6.2

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