Wiggle it

More progress on the Willow Garage robot. Plugging yourself in is actually quite a hard manipulation task, which is sometimes even challenging for humans. I notice that in the video the wall socket cover is cracked, so maybe the robot bashed it too hard during development.



There would be easier ways to do this, such as having a special recharging station, as used by Roombas and other mobile robots. However, being able to use regular mains sockets would be a significant advantage in terms of maximising the ease of deployment, since such sockets usually exist in every room and require no special setup.

Since I have far more free time at present than would usually be the case I may investigate the possibility of using their Robot Operating System. I have my own system, written in C#, which does substantially the same sort of message passing between processes, but if it looks like there's something out there which is reasonably easy to use and has an existing development community, it might be a better long term strategy to combine efforts.

Maybe there ought to be a scientific term for "wiggling". You could call it "off-axis rotational re-alignment" or "closed loop manipulator pose optimisation".