This is my last project at MathWorks Robotics Team (who develops the Robotics System Toolbox (RST)). Inspired by Haddadin’s famous demo, the idea is to demonstrate manipulator algorithms in RST for the safe robot-environment interaction to a ROS-enabled robot. In this project I implemented Haddadin’s time scaling method to achieve safe trajectory tracking on the Sawyer from Rethink Robotics. The purpose of this project is threefold:

1. Contributed an simulation in Simulink with Simscape Multibody to showcase the usage of Robotics Manipulator Blocks.
2. Using RST to test different APIs with the experiments on Sawyer through Robot Operating System (ROS), including the MATLAB code with ROS functions, the Simulink implementation with ROS blocks, and C++ code generated the from Simulink as a ROS node that can directly run on Sawyer.
3. As part of the demonstrations presented in an annual company-wise event.

In the Simulink example, I also implemented a simple contact model (as a spring damper system) to simulate the interaction between the end-effector of the Sawyer and the environment. The extended (marketing) video adapted from this project has been posted on MATLAB Facebook page since this September and currently got 15k views!