Purpose: Exploration into Forward and Inverse Kinematics for robotic motion. This is part of a Directed Reading elective series that takes during the Spring 2026 term at the University of Washington Tacoma.
This project uses the existing SO-ARM101 leader/follower arm pairs and their build kits. Since my goal for the directed reading was to apply the principles of forward and inverse kinematics, leveraging an already developed system was desirable. Most of these kits utilize the Arduino boards and associated IDE, however since I have other projects in the near future that require the use of various ESPs I decided to utilize the ESP-IDF instead. My primary source materials are the text Robotics Modeling, Planning, and Control by Bruno Siciliano, Lorenzo Sciavicco, Luigi Villani, Giuseppe Oriolo and the youtube channel found here.
The DR1_kinematics folder holds the ESP-IDF project files and the reflection folder holds the directed reading weekly reflections. The file in the root labeled todo is there to present issues identified in the code that need to be tackled. This serves two purposes, my own personal tracking and for the advisor for this reading Raghavi Sakpaul to know where the project is at. A Resources folder has aslo been added for any documents related to this project.
The final stage of this project is to show tele-operations and waypoint operations between the leader and follower arms. Preferablely by utilizing ESP's wireless communication protocol ESP-NOW as a channel between the arms and the laptop running the commandline application coordinating the two arms. Since this project is an exploration into kinematics, I'm not attempting anything more than a reasonable, straightforward approach to inverse kinematics.
This Repository will receive a few updates after this elective is over to close it out, however I am looking to explore other directed readings in the future. Specifically, machine learning applications to robotic motion, movement planning to handle best case for multiple solutions in inverse kinematics, as well as pairing with vision systems (camera, LIDAR). These other directed readings will use other repositories, but will be linked here in the future.
[UPDATE May 26th] Teleoperation is online and working. Below is the first run with the Follower operating under guidance of the Leader.
