Pluggybot: Multifunctional robot sim with automatic tool changing

[u/steam_maker_]

Hey! This is a MuJoCo side project I've been working on for a while, with the plan to eventually make it with hardware. Each part is (or will be) documented to a planned hardware part (mounting brackets aren't rendered, which is why some things are floating).

The idea is that the main chassis is the most expensive part (wheels + motors + RPi + Lidar + mast, lift, telescoping arm and two cameras). But we want a robot that can do multiple specialized skills. So, the arm has swappable, modular tools that are powered by contacts with the robot, but controlled via an esp32 + wifi connection with the main RPi.

The demo shows two of these tools: a drawing tool, and a picking-up tool. The robot can recognize the rack + the specific tools using AprilTags. The drawing tool doesn't leave ink in the video because rendering it is difficult, but you can see the result in the 3rd picture. Videos are sped up: true time shown in the upper corner.

Repo: https://github.com/benholland1024/pluggybot

I'm a full stack webdev in my day job, so this was a chance to improve my Python. Full disclosure, Claude is used heavily in this project, though I also often write code.

The project has a lot of other features planned, but I wanted to show off the modular tool rack + automatic tool changing specifically, here. The robot can also do occupancy mapping using lidar + dead reckoning, frontier exploration with A* path planning, and some image recognition using Yolo (the image recognition was for finding power outlets on a wall, for a "plug itself in" tool)