Hello Everyone, I am pretty new to the AR3 arm, but I believe that it has a lot of promise due to its quality and relatively low-cost compared to other robot arms on the market. My background is mostly in robotics software, algorithms, and simulation, so I started organizing the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 and MoveIt2 git repositories for the AR3. For those that are unfamiliar with ROS, ROS is a framework for robotics software and MoveIt2 is a ROS software package for controlling fairly arbitrary multi-DOF robot arms. Last week, I started configuring MoveIt2 for the AR3 using the URDF and mesh files that Chris Annin initially created. Here is a video of the current state of my progress:

In the video, I dragged the AR3's end-effector into a desired state (position and orientation) and then I requested a plan from MoveIt2 to achieve the desired state. The plan is then sent to the ros2_control software, which sends joint commands to the robot arm, while measuring the positions of the joints for feedback. I still need to optimize the collision detection settings that are used during planning and I need to enforce velocity/acceleration constraints on the joints. The ROS2/MoveIt2 packages are open source and published under my consulting company's GitHub organization:

I'll be doing a lot of work in simulation, but I will be looking through everyone else's posts to figure out the best way to build the AR3 to test with a physical robot.

I haven't written about the AR3 robot arm yet, but I will be writing some blog posts about the ROS2/MoveIt2 integration with the AR3 on my website soon: https://www.kevindemarco.com/