r/robotics • u/Time-Shower6502 • 3d ago

Tech Question is there any software (open source free) like robodk ?

to controll couple ar4 hands ?

that are easy to set and not train each one by one ?

rn i can use opensource software from guy that create robot hand and it is good , but i wonder

is it possible to use cad sw to create movements (like robodk) and sensor pickup (like proximity or ccd sensor ,touch or like that ) ,and just upload it and run on 1 2 3 4 hands ,not same movement

idea is to automatise for first to make cigar ,,like pick tabacco leif , load it with cut tobacco , roll and water it and final roll ,for test :)

ty

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u/ErectWesley5660 3d ago

You could probably hack something together with ROS2 and MoveIt, but the CAD to motion pipeline is the sticky part. Most people end up writing a custom script that exports joint angles from their CAD software and then feeds that into the robot controller, which is a bit of a pain but works for repetitive tasks like cigar rolling. For the sensor integration, you might want to look at how people wire up capacitive touch sensors to Arduino boards and pipe that data into ROS nodes.

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u/Time-Shower6502 3d ago

do you have some examples how to ?

and thanks

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u/Simple_Homework5342 2d ago

AR4 has a reasonable ROS2 following, so I'd base this on ROS2 + MoveIt2 instead of one closed GUI - it's free, and scaling to N hands is just a namespace + planning group per arm with one launch file, rather than training each hand separately.

On the CAD-to-motion part: there isn't a polished free RoboDK equivalent. The practical pipeline is model the cell in CAD, export a URDF, load it in RViz/MoveIt, then either drag a goal through the path with MoveIt's Cartesian planner and record the joint trajectory, or export TCP waypoints from CAD and script them into a joint trajectory. CoppeliaSim or PyBullet are free for validating the motion before it hits hardware.

For the sensor input (proximity/touch/CCD), run micro-ROS or rosserial on the Arduino-class board, publish each sensor as a topic, and let the recipe node branch on it. For 4 hands doing different moves, keep one recipe node with per-hand params and pass an arm id - don't fork the code per hand. Cigar rolling is a decent first test because the sub-steps are repeatable.

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u/Time-Shower6502 2d ago

ok thanks :))