Search Results for: work volume

The workspace of a robot arm is the set of all positions that it can reach. This depends on a number of factors including the dimensions of the arm.

We learn the principles behind ‘gyros’, sensors that measure angular velocity with respect to the universe.

We learn the principles behind magnetometers, sensors that measure the Earth’s magnetic field.

We learn the principles behind accelerometers, sensors that measure acceleration due to motion and due to the Earth’s gravitational field.

Most computers today have a built-in camera. Let’s look at how we can grab images directly from such a camera and put them in the MATLAB workspace.

Time varying coordinate frames are required to describe how the end-effector of a robot should move to grab an object, or to describe objects that are moving in the world. We make an important distinction between a path and a trajectory.

Imagine trying to find a face in a crowd. If we know what the face looks like we could search for it at every possible location — this is the essence of template matching. To make it work we need to describe how similar each area we are checking is to the reference face image […]

Digital images are everywhere: in your phone, on your hard drive, on the internet. We can access still pictures, movies and streams from live cameras all around the world. Let’s talk about digital images and how we can get them into the MATLAB environment where we can work on them.

Every time I give a public talk about robots people ask questions about the impact on jobs. Let’s discuss some of the issues around robots and jobs, and people and robots might work together in the future.

We start by considering the effect of gravity acting on a robot arm, and how the torque exerted will disturb the position of the robot controller leading to a steady state error. Then we discuss a number of strategies to reduce this error.