Dennis Wai

Dennis Wai

Mechanical engineer from 🇭🇰 turned extraterrestrial roboticist

Baxter Robot and Blocks

Published:


Baxter from Rethink Robotics is an robot platform that Te Tang, Hsien Chung Lin, and I worked on so that we can detect toy blocks and then stack them. Powered by ROS, AprilTags and some elbow grease, we successfully implemented block stacking on Baxter. The following slideshow will provide overviews and problem resolutions for our project.

ROS Node Graph
Flowchart for Baxter's block suctions
Limitations with Baxter's platform

Baxter needs its toy blocks resting on a flat surface about 3 feet away from its head. Each of the toy blocks (a 1 inch cube) is prelabeled with a AprilTag for unique identification. Then, Baxter will follow a preprogrammed kinematic path to stack the blocks.

Baxter's View of the Workspace
Baxter analyzing workspace and then computing an arm pose
Baxter in the midst of a extraction operation

For a full discussion on our project, check out our code on Github and our project website.

Go Bears! We bought many toy blocks for this project.