[Justin] wrote in to tell us about the rover which his CalTech team has entered in NASA’s Exploration Robo-Ops Competition. Their time to shine is later this week, but you can see some of the test footage after the break.
The operator pictured above is using a controller which is a scale model of the manipulator arm, with two cameras giving feedback. One of those monitors shows a feed from the arm itself, providing a view of the gripper. The other feed is a wide shot of the working area from the body of the robot. The arm has six degrees of freedom actuated by servo motors. The controller is a replica of the arm laser cut from acrylic. At each joint there’s a potentiometer whose value is used to establish the position of the frame.
At first we thought that this would be more fatiguing and less convenient than using a gaming controller. But as we look at the dexterity of the arm it becomes obvious that joysticks and buttons would just make things more difficult.
Most awesome CLAW game ever.
Wow… that’s a coincidence… I’ve been working on a similar concept =) exept mine is providing haptic feedback for virtual environments :
Here’s one of my demos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpumYVimSM8
Pretty cool. A long time ago I wrote some software in VB that turns a Microsoft force feedback joystick into a gated shifter for racing sims. The gear positions were gated via haptic feedback. You could load different H-gate presets and they would feel correct while shifting. I was even going to make it “grind” if you attempted an invalid shift, but I could never fix this huge issue with lag.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZtbAJ50lVo