This is the final project for the Robotic Manipulation class taught by Dr. Kevin Lynch. This project exercised the application of knowledge gained in this class through the entire quarter. The goal of this project was to develop a feedforward and PI controller simulation for a Kuka YouBot running in Coppelia Robotics’ VREP.
Kinematics Initial conditions for the Kuka YouBot (position, orientation, and arm joint angles) and a pre-defined end-effector trajectory over a fixed timespan were specified. The desired trajectory is given as a position and an orientation that change over time. At each point along the path, the controller solves for both the joint angles of the 5 joint robot arm and the wheel rotations of the base that will place the end effector at that desired point. I used odometry to gauge and control the position and orientation of the mechanum-wheeled chassis. The deviation or error between the desired path and the current path is fed into the combined feedforward-PI controller to compute inputs for the next time step. The controller and all associated libraries were written entirely in Python.