Final Year Project - Robot plays air hockey

Hi, This blog will be a quick rundown of my current progress with the final year project. With only a month to go left, I have to optimise my time and prioritise the main components of my project. The vision and trajectory prediction have been updated lately, therefore I don't plan on changing the methods and processes I have used until the final implementation. I decided not to use a raspberry pi as I want to have everything running on the Linux PC. In addition, I plan on not implementing the LEDs on the final setup as I believe that there is sufficient lighting in the room where the system is located. Immanuel

Hi, In this blog, I will explain the functions that the Moveit! package provides to move the ABB to end-effector positions. Using MoveIt! KDL solver, I am able to move the robot to predicted y-coordinates given x-coordinates using my trajectory prediction algorithm. A function that I explored is compute_cartesian_path which plans a Cartesian path by specifying a list of waypoints for the end-effector to go through. Within the Moveit! package, the convention is to use metres, therefore, I chose a step size of 0.01 to move the robot between points at a resolution of 1cm. Below is a snippet of my code that implements the compute_cartesian_path function to move the robot to positions in  reference to the air-hockey table. Implementation of compute_cartesian_path function Sending trajectory commands from ROS to the robot's controller creates a small delay due to the implementation of the ABB driver of downloading trajectories instead of streaming them. It is difficult for t...