Realtime controlled robotic arm through Blender
Justine Dailey published on his website few videos which demonstrate a great application of controlling external hardware through realime interaction with Blender. He custom wrote code to communicate between Blender and the ports which are connected to the servos and offers those on his website for free.
He wrote:
To finish up my B.S. in Computer Engineering, I had to come up with a design project. I had always wanted to create a robotic arm and control it with a joystick or something. I had also recently been playing around with the open source 3D program, Blender 2.49 (this does not work in Blender 2.5+). After realizing the potential of Blender’s built in Python scripting capabilities, I figured why not let Blender control it! Blender can use the full Python installation, Python can send data out the USB port, and there is dozens of ways to control a motor from a microprocessor. I figured I could use Blender to create a 3D model of the robotic arm, control the arm inside of Blender, and have the physical arm stay in sync.
So I did!
YouTube Video:
More videos are on his blog:
http://justindailey.blogspot.com/2011/03/real-time-controlled-robotic-arm.html
IMpressive!
Wow! That’s pretty amazing! Who would have thought that it would be possible to automate robotics through your everyday 3D program like blender! This may just be a project for school right now, but the potential behind this is extraordinary! Respect!!
-Jon
Bolody brilliant!
Wow ! Blender is just amazing…its potential is just limit less
Suggested by youtube!!
Blender Animatronic Controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEDP4FcCuXI&feature=player_embedded
A group of my students did something a bit more involved, with a real industrial robot, some years ago:
. This shows a milling application, where the trajectory generation and simulation was done with Blender, while sending it to a real robot. Since then, a lot of efforts in the direction of using Blender for serious robotics have been spent in the context of the MORSE project
.
Herman
This is awesome. I’ve been waiting for someone to do this in Blender. To show how this can be applied, check out http://roboticarts.com/ It is a friend of mine who created a proprietary interface for Maya to control huge industrial robots for entertainment. His robots have been on tour with Bon Jovi for the past two years where 5 robots hold massive video screens that move to become a video wall, stage for the band to walk on etc.
The animation is created in Maya (similar to what this Blender demo shows) for each song and then played back with thousandths of a millimeter of accuracy each time.
So Blender is the one who will usher in our future robotic masters …. Cyberdyn thanks you.
yudhir, yep, this is my link =) we’ve done the same few years ago. I’ve coded it in python then in C and we use Altera chip for PWM.
Nice arm btw =)
Lol…
This is pretty easy done with phidgets.
The problem is blender can reach speeds the actual arm cannot do, smartly avoided in this vid.
Still cool. Using IKA to control the virtual arm is pretty smart.
Wow, pretty nice function there
but why Blender 2.5 cant be used in same way as 2.49? Is there some unfinished part in Blender Python API?