Kinematics & Dynamics Library for Baxter Arm

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Python software library for Baxter robot kinematics and dynamics, improving reliability and performance over existing solutions, facilitating research and experimentation with Baxter.

Contribution

The authors developed a Python library for Baxter's kinematics and dynamics, offering more reliable and efficient control tools compared to the official SDK and existing libraries.

Findings

The library supports pose and velocity kinematics with Jacobian operations.

Performance comparison shows improvements over PyKDL.

Enhanced reliability of Baxter control for research applications.

Abstract

The Baxter robot is a standard research platform used widely in research tasks, supported with an SDK provided by the developers, Rethink Robotics. Despite the ubiquitous use of the robot, the official software support is sub-standard. Especially, the native IK service has a low success rate and is often inconsistent. This unreliable behavior makes Baxter difficult to use for experiments and the research community is in need of a more reliable software support to control the robot. We present our work towards creating a Python based software library supporting the kinematics and dynamics of the Baxter robot. Our toolbox contains implementation of pose and velocity kinematics with support for Jacobian operations for redundancy resolution. We present the implementation and performance of our library, along with a comparison with PyKDL. Keywords- Baxter Research Robot, Manipulator Kinematics, Iterative IK, Dynamical Model, Redundant Manipulator