Reading the last names of the authors of these publications is refreshing, particularly in contrast to the often nationalistic comments that have peppered discussion of this rover.
Care to elaborate why you think the comments on this rover are nationalistic? Or, do you feel the same way about comments regarding NASA or JAXA achievements?
Am at a company now where we're very likely to use Vention to build an automation test stand in the near future. Our use case is as follows:
- want 1-2 of these setups (low quantity)
- needs to hold/fixture a 20-30kg robotic arm (pretty much a standard cobot), so we'd like something beefy and rigid. This isn't something I'd just clamp down on any work desk
- overall footprint about the size of a twin-sized bed
- we have some specific dimensional requirements dictated by our physical task and also the place for installation, so retrofitting an existing COTS table or test setup isn't necessarily feasible or straightforward
- we want some degree of ability to adjust and modify the positioning of subcomponents, so the t-slot is particularly helpful
Certainly, I could get what I want in terms of parts for a lot less money via 8020/Misumi and piece this together myself with some post-machining, but then I'd also have to download the individual CAD files for the parts (if they're available) and then reconstruct my desired setup in another CAD program. Then, I'd need to build my own BoM and coordinate part ordering from a selection of vendors. None of this is outside of my abilities, but I have a lot of other things to do for the project, and if my company's willing to bite the bullet on the additional cost, Vention solves a lot of problems for me on this front. They also offer (last I checked) some components for actuator/manipulator mounting compatible with their extrusions that other vendors don't sell.
In my opinion, most setups around the size of a standard cardboard moving box can be pieced together pretty simply with a combination of COTS parts, basic hand tools, 3d-printing, and services like Ponoko/Sendcutsend/Oshcut without too much hassle. Anything larger or with higher payloads or with more significant tolerance requirements than our use case I described above should probably be handled by a group/company that has some experience/expertise in building those sort of structures, especially if several of them need to be built.
If anyone else has come across similar modular setups/services, please let me know!
Disclaimer: my company is a Vention "Certified System Integrator" in the Pacific Northwest USA.
I can say that Vention, along with their comparables in the modular framing/light automation world (see: Bosch Rexroth, Item North America) will put some great tools in front of you to piece together solutions within their ecosystem, and you'll be able to check your requirements against their various specifications with regard to maximum loading, linear axis speeds etc, but they will of course not inherently perform a full engineering analysis of your application, or really make any guarantees on your design's suitability for any particular purpose.
For that level of services, they will loop in an integrator, who will work within the hardware ecosystem, but add value in validation, assembly, service/support and non-ecosystem component integration.
I will provide exported STEP files soon, alongside the STL files. I used Solidworks not only because it's the standard in our research lab, but also because I couldn't do what I wanted with any other CAD package. My source files are actually highly parametric, with extensive use of a set of global variables to help me adapt the designs for different printer settings and different system design constraints without having to rebuild the CAD every single time. The closest open-source solution I could find with similar functionality was OpenSCAD, but (imo) it's not mature enough to handle assemblies or more detailed models, and I'd bet that far fewer people have ever tried OpenSCAD than Solidworks.
If you can suggest an alternative open-source CAD package, not just file format, I'd be happy to look into it. Thanks for the interest!
The other two projects that leap to mind for open source CAD are FreeCAD and BRL-CAD, but I'm not sure either would meet your particular requirements. I'm pretty sure BRL-CAD doesn't offer the sort of parametrics you'd want (the closest thing would probably be writing a procedural generator, which usually means C/C++ or a scripting language). I'm less sure about FreeCAD - they use the OpenCASCADE engine - but if the other commercial systems didn't offer what you want I'd be surprised if FreeCAD had it (not impossible though - it might be worth asking the dev team if your workflow could be realized in FreeCAD.)
Providing the STEP and STL files should cover pretty much what the open source CAD world is prepared to handle - FreeCAD can import STEP and BRL-CAD is working on it, and most 3D printing applications I know of can work with STL just fine. Thank you for taking the trouble to make the extra formats available.
The MIT underactuated robotics course actually deals with underactuated robotics in terms of dynamics. Our hands considers underactuation from a quasi-static perspective. The main take-away for our project/design is that the final configuration of the hand is determined not only by the actuator inputs, but also the fingers' interactions with the object and environment.
One of my research interests is leveraging the benefits of crowdsourcing to answer some problems/challenges that are best addressed by human intuition and cognitive ability. For this class project, we were interested to see how a robot without the ability to change facial expressions can still express different emotions. The robot, Keepon, is a (relatively) well-known robot used in social interaction studies with autistic children. If any of you have some extra time to play around with this mini webapp, I'd appreciate it. I'd also love to hear from any of you regarding your opinions on how these sort of crowdsourcing approaches might best be implemented in the future.
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