Force and Torque Control of the Pr2 Robot

The project consist of upgrading the motor drivers on the pr2 to allow force/torque control through Ethercat protocol

While working as a reasearch assitant at the Robotic research group KU Leuven, I worked on updgrading the PR2 robots arm to use EtherCat Compliant drivers under Prof. Dr. Ir. Herman Bruyninckx. The integration was done using SOEM library(https://github.com/OpenEtherCATsociety/SOEM) to allows communication from the drivers to the pr2 robot motors. The end goal was to allow force and torque control of the robot arm using petrinet based state machines to allow real-time control. More info can found in the appendix of the reference(Stevedan, 2020).

The following video shows one of the video experiments obtained during the project:

Robotic arm moving after receiving cyclic torque command

Some of the results of the experiments performed can be found below:

Position and rotation of each motors
Position and rotation of each motors
Connectors PR2 Driver
EVEREST NET 30/80

Full implementation can be found here

References

2020

  1. master_thesis1.gif
    Simulation and control of a BLDC motor with methods on real-time data exchange and visualization
    Omodolor Stevedan
    UPC, Escola d’Enginyeria de Barcelona Est, Departament d’Enginyeria de Sistemes, Automàtica i Informàtica Industrial, Jul 2020