Small Scale Manipulation with the Calliope Robot

Calliope is an open source mobile robot designed in the Tekkotsu Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with RoPro Design, Inc. The Calliope5SP model features an iRobot Create base, an ASUS netbook, a 5-degree of freedom arm with a gripper with two independently controllable fingers, and a Sony PlayStation Eye camera and Robotis AX-S1 IR rangefinder on a pan/tilt mount. We use chess as a test of Calliope’s abilities. Since Calliope is a mobile platform we consider how problems in vision and localization directly impact the performance of manipulation. Calliope’s arm is too short to reach across the entire chessboard. The robot must therefore navigate to a location that provides the best position to access the pieces it wants to move. The robot proved capable of performing small-scale manipulation tasks that require careful positioning.