Robot simulated in Bullet

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elvis
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2018 5:29 am

Robot simulated in Bullet

Post by elvis »

Hi,

first of all sorry if this is already a topic. I've searched in the topics but I didn't find what I am exactly searching.

In short:
- I have a robot with 6 axis, designed in an offline programming software, together with its kinematics;
- I am implementing a VR project with Leap Motion and I want to manipulate the robot with the hands.
The goal is to touch with the hand a robot arm and the robot will move.

I have created btCompoundShape for all 6 robots bodies and spheres + cylinders to represent the fingers.
Since I have the kinematic chain defined in this offline programming software, how the Bullet model should look like?

I tried to use rigid bodies + hinge constraints to link this bodies + a very big mass. Is this the right approach? I guess I don't need to define the kinematics in Bullet.

Thank you a lot.
Last edited by elvis on Wed Aug 22, 2018 4:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
elvis
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2018 5:29 am

Re: Robot simulated in Bullet

Post by elvis »

Ok, so I'm coming back with some more research and tries:
I created rigid bodies for all robot's bodies and I added hinge constraints, using the joint matrices.
The base of the robot is the fixed part (mass = 0) and the other bodies have mass.
Now the robot is balancing, I will need to search how to stop the action of the gravity when you have hinge constraints. I want to move the "joints" only if somebody interacts with the robot.

On the other hand I tried b3RobotSimulatorClientAPI that "is pretty much the C++ version of pybullet" but I cannot create there a robot from scratch, only import it from different file formats (hopefully I'm not wrong).
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