Has anyone made a leader arm for the AR4? Are there cheaper motors we could use that are drop in replacements?
What do you mean by leader arm?
@johann-voigtlander An arm (usually built with cheaper materials / motors) that can be used to remotely control the follower arm (for example AR4). This is used to teleop or to train AI models for the arm. The leader is only used to read values for the joints from.
I have not seen that for the AR4, but it would be cool to implement it.
@johann-voigtlander Was thinking of modifying this design to meet the same proportions as AR4: https://github.com/AlexanderKoch-Koch/low_cost_robot As long as the proportions and joints are the same, it should work fine. I have to get better at cad to learn how to modify it though! Will post when I get it done.
Yeah, and I've had to develop my own firmware. The main issue is that you have to be able to issue a "move joints" command while the arm is already in motion from a previous command and have the arm change where it's going. The stock firmware doesn't support this. You don't want the arm to come to a complete stop between movement commands. This creates a huge amount of vibration and jerk especially when you're issuing commands at max speed and acceleration.
It remains an open question how to do this in the best way to minimize jerk while maximizing responsiveness. If you have any ideas, please share.
@aleksandr-dobkin Is your firmware open source? Maybe I can contribute when I get to that point. Seems like we’re doing similar things
@ya I'll have to do some code cleanup but I can share my code. Just let me know when you get to that point
@aleksandr-dobkin any chance you have got around to doing this yet?
