Task analysis

Our tasks for this chapter are pretty straightforward. We will use a robot arm to pick up the toys we identified in the previous chapter. This can be divided into the following tasks:

• First, we build an interface to control the robot arm. We are using ROS 2 to connect the various parts of the robot together, so this interface is how the rest of the system sends commands and receives data from the arm. Then we get into teaching the arm to perform its function, which is picking up toys. The first level of capability is picking up or grasping toys. Each toy is slightly different, and the same strategy won’t work every time. Also, the toy might be in different orientations, so we have to adapt to how the toy is presented to the robot’s end effector (a fancy name for its hand). So rather than write a lot of custom code that may or may not work all the time, we want to create a structure so that the robot can learn for itself.
• The next problem we face...