Mobile manipulator support for ardupilot

Hello,I Am a student for India pursing my bachelors currently in the field of electronics engineering.
I plan on submitting a proposal for GSOC 2020 I would like to have some inputs regarding the idea

rover

This idea is based on giving ArduRover support for a robotic manipulator, which essentially gives the rover manipulation capabilities which can be extended to ArduSub in the future hopefully .I would like suggestions on how this can be achieved or if this idea seems to be an appropriate one in the first place?

The way I see it this can be achieved through two approaches
ROVER

  • Adding a new mode for rover which when enabled switches the controls of the transmitter to control the arm

  • Create a new vehicle config like balance bot, boats etc

SUB

  • In case of ArduSub a mode can be implemented with the basic capabilities of DepthHold where it holds its position and the control of the joystick can be transferred to control the manipulator momentarily until the manipulation task is completed

Unlike a basic gripper this gives Rover/sub access to manipulate at higher DOFs

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hello,

That is an interesting idea but from my experience, the control of robotic arm is really expensive in computer power specially if you want some intelligent control like moving from the gripper frame.
And they are expensive !

I don’t think there is a need for a new mode, a switch would be enough !

Hey @khancyr
sorry for the late response , correct me if I am wrong with the use of switches its not possible to have analog control of the arm . I propose the new mode when enabled switches the channel rc1 which is throttle to control the vertical motion of the arm and rc 3 (ground steering ) switches to control the horizontal axis of the arm momentarily until the manipulation task is done.
For example this . Is this scalable

By switch I mean a radio switch to pass from motion control to arm control, you can even assign other channel to control the arm like for gimbal. You don’t need a whole mode for this. In fact, you can already control arm like you want, you just need to map the input to the output correctly, nothing prevent it
It would be another story if you do intelligent control of the arm through geometric model.

Got it , thanks for the clarification