[mlpack] Robotic Arm - GSoC Project Idea

[Marcus Edel]

Hello Vaibhav,

thanks for the input, I agree ROS is definitely a good option to get started,
the available resources is just one point. My initial idea was to integrate the
simulator in the OpenAI Gym framework, mlpack already follows the gym interface
so the interaction is already in place, but I think we could use the Gazebo
extension for Gym to get it working. This looks promising
(https://github.com/erlerobot/gym-gazebo). Not sure the install process is
straightforward, in the best case we can install everything with a few clicks
and most packages are available for a bunch of distributions.

Thanks,
Marcus

> On 26. Feb 2018, at 10:42, Vaibhav Jain <vabsweb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey Marcus,
> I think ROS is a better platform to work on since it already has many built-in libraries to handle the control system of the arm. It has a large community and libraries dedicated to robotic systems which will help us to focus on our task rather than writing scripts for control and path planning from scratch. For eg., we can use kinect sensor to monitor the orientation of the arm which can be easily added to gazebo. Through many available libraries, we can just get joint angles of the arm. Also, it will be easier to implement this on an actual robotic arm later if we use ROS as a platform (if someone plans to do it).
> 
> As far as for computation concerns, we probably won't be training on the same machine with ROS unless we have a GPU onboard. If GPU is available, then there won't be any problems with the performance since ROS (and gazebo) can easily run on any modern machine. But assuming we proceed with the aim in mind that the project should eventually be able to implementable on actual manipulators, most manipulators will not have GPU on them (*I say "most" but I don't think any of them does*). So we will have to be able to access remote GPU.
> Although we can still use OpenGL, I think using ROS is a better and faster idea. I also think there wasn't much work done on mlpack with ROS, so I think this is a good opportunity to start with. Let me know what you think.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> - Vaibhav Jain
> 
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 6:39 PM, Marcus Edel <marcus.edel at fu-berlin.de <mailto:marcus.edel at fu-berlin.de>> wrote:
> Hello Vaibhav,
> 
> thanks for getting in touch.
> 
> > One of your project, Robotic Arm, specially catches my eye as I have previously
> > worked on a fair amount of projects based on robotic manipulators and humanoid.
> > One of them also includes a gesture-controlled robotic arm in which a robotic
> > arm mimics the motion of the user's arm. I have also worked on ROS and gazebo
> > simulator. It would be an interesting idea to use mlpack with ROS which could
> > give Gazebo more flexibility.
> 
> That sounds really interesting, I was also thinking about using ROS for the
> simulation, I'm not a ROS expert but do you think that is a good option as e.g.
> compared to a simple python OpenGL script? There are two points that I think are
> important, performance: the training is going to consume all resources, so the
> simulator should not be demanding; easy to install, I think everyone likes to
> keep the number of dependencies low. Let me know what you think.
> 
> > Right now, I have build and gone through some tutorials on mlpack. I am trying
> > to get more familiar with mlpack's codebase. If you can give me some pointers
> > for the project, it would be awesome. Thanks.
> 
> Sounds good, for this project the ann and RL code is especially important, so
> taking a closer look at the tests is a good way to get familiar with that part
> of the codebase.
> 
> Let me know if I should clarify anything.
> 
> Thanks,
> Marcus
> 
> 

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