Robotics Development

Robotic Arms & Dev Kits

Eva is a 6-axis of freedom and ease of use, the lab robot arm easily automates the loading and unloading of samples into lab machines, precision balances and more. Eva can handle a range of common lab items including microplates, PCR tube strips, eppendorf tubes, petri dishes and microscope slides to automating repetitive and strenuous sample handling processes. Common manufacturing machine tending applications with Eva include start/end of line loading and unloading of machines such as CNC machines, CMMs, metal presses and chemical etching machines.

Eva lab robot arm from Automata. Source: Automata

AWS DeepRacer autonomous Car Kit

Checkout the AWS DeepRacer autonomous Car Kit

AWS DeepRacer autonomous Car Kit Hardware Specifications

  • CAR: 18th scale 4WD with monster truck chassis
  • CPU: Intel Atom™ Processor
  • MEMORY: 4GB RAM
  • STORAGE: 32GB (expandable)
  • WI-FI: 802.11ac
  • CAMERA: 4 MP cameras with MJPEG
  • SOFTWARE: Ubuntu OS 16.04 LTS, Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit, ROS Kinetic
  • DRIVE BATTERY: 7.4V/1100mAh lithium polymer
  • COMPUTE BATTERY: 13600mAh USB-C PD
  • PORTS: 4x USB-A, 1x USB-C, 1x Micro-USB, 1x HDMI
  • SENSORS: Integrated accelerometer and gyroscope

Checkout the SunFounder PiCar-V Kit V2.0 for Raspberry Pi

Robotics Learning Resources

Robotics courses from Coursera

Learn Robotics with Online Courses and Classes from edX

Top Robotics Courses Online from Udemy

Free Online AI & Robotics Courses

REC Foundation Robotics Industry Certification

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy

RIA Robotic Integrator Certification Program

AWS RoboMaker – Develop, Test, Deploy, and Manage Intelligent Robotics Apps

Microsoft AI School

Language Understanding (LUIS) for Azure Cognitive Services

ROS on Windows 10

Windows ML ROS Node

Azure VM templates to bootstrap ROS and ROS 2 environments

Google Robotics Research

Robotics Tools and Frameworks

Robot Framework is a generic open source automation framework. It can be used for test automation and robotic process automation. It has easy syntax, utilizing human-readable keywords. Its capabilities can be extended by libraries implemented with Python or Java.

The Robotics Library (RL) is a self-contained C++ library for robot kinematics, motion planning and control. It covers mathematics, kinematics and dynamics, hardware abstraction, motion planning, collision detection, and visualization.RL runs on many different systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows. It uses CMake as a build system and can be compiled with Clang, GCC, and Visual Studio.

Robot Structural Analysis Professional is structural load analysis software developed by Autodesk that verifies code compliance and uses BIM-integrated workflows to exchange data with Revit. It can help you to create more resilient, constructible designs that are accurate, coordinated, and connected to BIM.

PowerMill is a software developed by Autodesk that provides powerful, flexible, easy-to-use tools for offline programming of robots. Get tools to help you optimize robotic paths and simulate virtual mock-ups of manufacturing cells and systems.

ROS is robotics middleware. Although ROS is not an operating system, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous computer cluster such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

ROS2 is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it’s all open source.

MoveIt is the most widely used software for manipulation and has been used on over 100 robots. It provides an easy-to-use robotics platform for developing advanced applications, evaluating new designs and building integrated products for industrial, commercial, R&D, and other domains.

AutoGluon is toolkit for Deep learning that automates machine learning tasks enabling you to easily achieve strong predictive performance in your applications. With just a few lines of code, you can train and deploy high-accuracy deep learning models on tabular, image, and text data.

Gazebo accurately and efficiently simulates indoor and outdoor robots. You get a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and programmatic and graphical interfaces.

Robotics System Toolbox provides tools and algorithms for designing, simulating, and testing manipulators, mobile robots, and humanoid robots. For manipulators and humanoid robots, the toolbox includes algorithms for collision checking, trajectory generation, forward and inverse kinematics, and dynamics using a rigid body tree representation. For mobile robots, it includes algorithms for mapping, localization, path planning, path following, and motion control. The toolbox provides reference examples of common industrial robot applications. It also includes a library of commercially available industrial robot models that you can import, visualize, and simulate.

Intel Robot DevKit is the tool to generate Robotics Software Development Kit (RDK) designed for autonomous devices, including the ROS2 core and capacibilities packages like perception, planning, control driver etc. It provides flexible build/runtime configurations to meet different autonomous requirement on top of diversity hardware choices, for example use different hareware engine CPU/GPU/VPU to accelerate AI related features.

Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects. Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your computer, used to write and upload computer code to the physical board.

ArduPilot enables the creation and use of trusted, autonomous, unmanned vehicle systems for the peaceful benefit of all. ArduPilot provides a comprehensive suite of tools suitable for almost any vehicle and application.

AirSim is a simulator for drones, cars and more, built on Unreal Engine (we now also have an experimental Unity release). It is open-source, cross platform, and supports hardware-in-loop with popular flight controllers such as PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations.

The JPL Open Source Rover is an open source, build it yourself, scaled down version of the 6 wheel rover design that JPL uses to explore the surface of Mars. The Open Source Rover is designed almost entirely out of consumer off the shelf (COTS) parts. This project is intended to be a teaching and learning experience for those who want to get involved in mechanical engineering, software, electronics, or robotics.

Light Detection and Ranging(LiDAR) is a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser at an object, and uses the time and wavelength of the reflected beam of light to estimate the distance and in some applications (Laser Imaging), to create a 3D representation of the object and its surface characteristics. This technology is commonly used in aircraft and self-driving vehicles.

AliceVision is a Photogrammetric Computer Vision Framework which provides a 3D Reconstruction and Camera Tracking algorithms. AliceVision aims to provide strong software basis with state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms that can be tested, analyzed and reused. The project is a result of collaboration between academia and industry to provide cutting-edge algorithms with the robustness and the quality required for production usage.

CARLA is an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions.

ROS bridge is a package to bridge ROS for CARLA Simulator.

ROS-Industrial is an open source project that extends the advanced capabilities of ROS software to manufacturing.

AWS RoboMaker is the most complete cloud solution for robotic developers to simulate, test and securely deploy robotic applications at scale. RoboMaker provides a fully-managed, scalable infrastructure for simulation that customers use for multi-robot simulation and CI/CD integration with regression testing in simulation.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a free .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications.

Visual Studio Code Extension for ROS is an extension provides support for Robot Operating System (ROS) development.

Azure Kinect ROS Driver is a node which publishes sensor data from the Azure Kinect Developer Kit to the Robot Operating System (ROS). Developers working with ROS can use this node to connect an Azure Kinect Developer Kit to an existing ROS installation.

Azure IoT Hub for ROS is a ROS package works with the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub service to relay telemetry messages from the Robot to Azure IoT Hub or reflect properties from the Digital Twin to the robot using dynamic reconfigure.

ROS 2 with ONNX Runtime is a program that uses ROS 2 to run on different hardware platforms using their respective AI acceleration libraries for optimized execution of the ONNX model.

Azure Cognitive Services LUIS ROS Node is a ROS node that bridges between ROS and the Azure Language Understanding Service. it can be configured to process audio directly from a microphone, or can subscribe to a ROS audio topic, then processes speech and generates "intent" ROS messages which can be processed by another ROS node to generate ROS commands.