Interface to control a robot arm

[OpenBot-Padawan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
OpenBot is all about autonomous navigation. What about giving OpenBot the ability to manipulate elements of its environment ?

Describe the solution you'd like
In the current state of the framework, OpenBot is capable of autonomous navigation with obstacle avoidance, point-goal navigation and tracking. I believe that the provided imitation learning pipeline could be used for manipulation tasks as well. There are currently a number of cheap robot arms on the market, based on a couple of AX12 servos or even classic RC servos. What about creating an interface, both at the firmware and software level, that would support the control of such a robot arm mounted on the robot ?

Describe alternatives you've considered
Add a raspberry pi coupled to another low-level board to control the robot arm. It does no makes much sense however since the smartphones usually have a much greater computation power. This would moreover require additional hardware, beside the robot arm itself...

[thias15]

This sounds like a great idea. Would you be willing to help build this feature?

[OpenBot-Padawan]

Sure, let's do this !

[samuk]

I realise this is an old thread, I have a grabber/lifter on my robot controlled by two 9g servos controlling those might be easier initially than doing a full arm? https://rosmo-robot.github.io/

[thias15]

Any update on this? Did you end up integrating it with OpenBot?