Marine Robotics Group

I’m doing a UROP (undergraduate research) at the MIT Marine Robotics Group this semester. I’m trying to reduce drift for Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) commonly used in underwater robots. My plan is to attach research-grade IMUs to a six-axis arm and simulate random robot movement. By comparing where the arm thinks it is with where the IMU thinks it is, I can train a machine learning model to reduce error in the IMUs.

These are the IMUs I am using.

This is my 6-axis robot, who I’ve named Armin.

I installed Ubuntu 18.04 on a laptop and setup ROS melodic and MoveIt to control the arm. In this video I use rvis to move the arm around. Sometimes it generates twisty paths to avoid singularities.

I sent the data from the Vectornav 100S IMU to rvis with this vectornav driver and imu_tools. The Vectornav 100 series doesn’t have built-in odometry so I will have to use another package to handle that.