If a two-wheel robot can't drive straight, it feels like a shopping cart with a mind of its own. The good news is that differential drive kinematics  gives me a clean way to predict, command, and debug that motion with just a few measurements. I only need the wheel radius (r), the wheelbase (L) (distance between wheel contact centers), encoder ticks per revolution, and a loop time (dt). From there, I solve two practical problems: forward kinematics  (wheel motion to robot mot

If you've only seen RRT * in diagrams or simulation, it can feel like a tidy math problem. Then you try it on real hardware, with real servos, and you learn what matters fast: sampling-based planning can create a path, but your robot still needs a full pipeline to move safely and smoothly. This post walks through a hands-on test of RRT* (Rapidly-exploring Random Tree Star) on a DIY 5-degree-of-freedom robot manipulator. It starts with a simple 2D "toy" example so you can see

Motion using Jacobians Have you ever tuned a controller in ROS 2 and thought, "Why is my end effector off by a few cm?" Or maybe your Cartesian jog feels smooth in RViz, but the real robot twitches. In many cases, the missing piece is the robot Jacobian . The Jacobian is the math that connects joint motion to tool motion. It sits under velocity control, inverse kinematics (IK), and even force or compliance control. If you can predict how joint speeds change the tool's motion,

Introduction Pre -Requisites for KDL  Step-By-Step process for solving kinematics using KDL KDL Solvers with ROS2 in Rviz and Gazebo...

1 Introduction When planning robot motion, we have two main approaches: joint space planning and Cartesian space planning. If you've ever...

Imagine you're a robot arm, tasked with picking up a cup of coffee. You know exactly where the cup is, but how do you figure out which...

Ever wondered how a robotic arm knows exactly where its hand (or claw, or gripper) is at any given moment? Enter the world of Forward...

Understanding DH Parameters: A Simple Hack for a Complex Problem We know that in the world of robotics, each link of a robot has 6...

Introduction Difference between clone, fetch and pull Getting on the same head of the file Merge Conflicts Life Cycle of a file...

Introduction Setup & Initialization  Branching & Merging Collaborating with Remote Repo sitory Stashing & Resetting  Debugging & Log s...

Introduction Types of Trajectory Planning Trajectory Planning with Trapezoidal Velocity Profile in Joint Space Mathematical...

Introduction Overview: Setting Up Your Control Node Key Concepts and Mathematics Building the Control Node in ROS 2 Challenges in Mobile...

Introduction General URDF Structure  al URDF Structure  URDF for 6-Axis Robotic Manipulator Explanation of Key Tags in URDF Learning...