Haddington Dynamics
Who Doesn’t Want to Play with Robots?
Creating a 3D model of a robot and using that model to manipulate a real robot remotely.
Training Robots
Haddington Dynamics was founded by a true genius, Kent Gilson (he built his own laser printer from scratch when he was eleven!). Haddington makes robotic arms that can be trained just by physically manipulating the arm. The robot remembers the movement and can play it back within 5 microns of accuracy! However, there’s another way to program the robots … using a 3D UI ZZW helped to create!
3D Robot Training UI
Working closely with the Haddington team, ZZW developed a 3D model UI that replicated the robot arm. By dragging the 3D robot image within the UI, movements can be communicated to real robots and stored for repeat use. This can even be done over the internet, manipulating robots in the other room or around the world. Imagine a factory floor filled with robots – our application allows a robot anywhere on the floor to be trained or adjusted from anywhere. We’ve created a state machine system allowing you to manipulate the robot arm through a series of easy to use states and actions as well as create a scene management component to visualize everything.
Technologies
This application was created in Unity, a 3D modeling application typically used for gaming. The application uses cameras and APRL tags to “see” the precise position of the robot and set the UI 3D model to that position. Then it uses a proprietary language to record movements by dragging the 3D model around the screen. This movement can then be played back by the real robot. We also build the web portion that allows the various robots to be stored and the movements saved in nodes on a web interface.
Yes, we are contributing to the robot apocalypse!
