Fresh out of the New Year break, I finally got around to reviving a pair of small Koch robots that I 3D-printed back in 2024. They had been collecting dust after some early experiments with an ACT model, so I decided to give them a second life — this time as a small claw-machine-style teleop setup that my son can eventually play with.
Technical Highlights
- Teleoperation via a joystick connected to an ESP32 board from the ROSCon 2025 ros2_control workshop
- picoRoS running directly on the ESP32, communicating with the robot over Zenoh
- Handwritten kinematics and Jacobian based on screw theory
- Nullspace velocity control for redundancy handling
- Thoughtful joystick mapping for intuitive teleop
- Controllers implemented using ros2_control
A fun way to combine embedded systems, control theory, ROS2, and some practical motivation at home.
Demo
Check out the video below where I teleop the follower arm with a joystick:
Jogging the follower arm with joystick input
Code
All code is open source and available on GitHub:
- koch_ros — where a leader-follower controller is also implemented (the follower arm can mirror the leader arm’s movements)
- picoros_playground
- dynamixel_hardware