I am new to posting here, so am not sure this is the right place to start this topic. If this is not the right place, please help me find where this thread might be better off.
Anyway, I am what I consider to be a robotics enthusiast and tinker in all things electronic. I am also an Amateur Radio operator. I am legally disabled and have certain physical challenges. One of those challenges is that I am not supposed to bend to the floor to pick stuff up. Even with a good reacher and grabber tool, there are many things I can not pick up from the floor. I want to develop a small robot with an arm and gripper that can go around and pick stuff up I drop and put it in an area I can easily access.
I have thought a lot about this and while I see some commercial and reasonably inexpensive (under $1000.00) robot platforms that I might be able to create something with, the software support is usually severely lacking.
My ideal platform would be a mecanum wheel based robot with one or more cameras and a flexible arm and gripper. One camera would be on the end of the arm that is focused on the gripper so the robot can see what the gripper is focused on. There would be at least one other camera focused on the floor that would initially find obects to process. When I say process, I mean to find objects of interest to focus the gripper on.
Since most of what I would need picked up from the floor are small or at least very light weight, this robot and arm would not need to be very large or strong. The power comes in to first identify objects of interest and then get the arm and gripper focused to pick them up. This robot might have a small dump area to dump interesting objects into so it does not have to run back to the target area every time it picks something up.
I am very interested in creating robots to make a living environment more accessible. Instead of having to wait for my helper person to pick things from the floor that I can not get myself, I believe a small robot I have described could be programmed to do this for me. I am sure I am not the only person who has this kind of problem they need help with. There are probably many ways technology could be used to help people like me with similar or very different problems that could be solved with an intelligent use of technology.
I am just getting to a place where I can start working on this full tilt. I am getting a Minisforum UM890 Pro with 64GB RAM for my main computer and this is a pretty major investment for me since I am on a low (SSDI) fixed income. I am planning to get the DEG2 eGPU dock and an RTX 5080 GPU so I can start learning the NVIDIA ecossytem, but it will take me several months to accomplish this.
8-Dale