Integration of anthropomorphic robots with high precision instrumentation

Industrial robots are not well suited for demonstrational and teaching use due to their complexity, cost and lack of a friendly interface. To this purpose a new category of robot is being studied and designed by companies, educational robots. In this context Comau s.p.a invested in the development of the “e.Do” project. This project aims at studying the capability of the robot when used outside of a teaching context. More specifically we are interested in investigating the capabilities of e.Do to operate a pick and place task in a “multiple-system” environment. A new ROS package to implement an interface between the robot and a digital microscope has been designed. Conceptually two aspects have been studied. First e.Do has been studied deeply in its code architecture and software-hardware structure. Typical robotics analysis, such as direct kinematics, Jacobian and so on are presented. All of this has been carried out to better understand the e.Do system, they way it works and communicates. Then in a second part a ROS package has been developed to accomplish the pick and place task.