ROS 2 Robotic Demonstrator

During an engineering internship at SCAILAB AB, the mandate was to assemble, integrate, and validate a unified robotic demonstration platform. The system required packaging an open-source 6-axis articulation arm into a ruggedized, fully self-contained flight case ready for immediate deployment in testing labs and external technical exhibitions.

• ■6-Axis Mechanical Assembly: Complete mechanical assembly and calibration of the robotic arm, aligning cycloidal and stepper drive axes for repeatability.
• ■Flight Case Conversion: Re-engineered a heavy-duty transport case with custom mounting plates, routed internal cable raceways, and an integrated switched-mode power distribution supply.
• ■Overhead Camera Rig: Designed an overhead structural truss to rigid-mount a computer vision camera directly above the arm workspace for real-time visual servoing.

Computational workloads are distributed across four independent processing units communicating over high-speed serial and Ethernet:

• ■Primary Host (Raspberry Pi 5): Executes high-level ROS 2 motion planning, trajectory calculation, and coordinate transformation trees.
• ■Vision Node (Raspberry Pi 5): Dedicated image processing pipeline isolating the CV compute overhead from time-critical control loops.
• ■Deterministic Kinematics (Teensy 4.1): Runs microsecond-level pulse generation and inverse kinematic interpolation.
• ■End-Effector Controller (Arduino Nano): Manages gripper state machines and limit-switch feedback isolated from the primary control bus.

The completed system functions as a dual-purpose platform: internally enabling rapid testing and validation of novel ROS 2 navigation and manipulation packages, and externally serving as a standalone, live demonstration rig.