AD
Sector Aviation Client Global airline Role Applied R&D lead, full build Dates 2024–present

Project Thor

A dual-arm research platform built ground up to give the team a way to actually test two-handed task work against the kinds of jobs the broader effort needs to handle.

Problem

The broader applied R&D effort needed an in-house testing rig purpose-built for two-handed task work, sized for the team’s task envelope, and modular enough to iterate on. Off-the-shelf research platforms either skewed toward humanoid form factors that aren’t deployment-relevant, or industrial cells that aren’t research-flexible. The team needed something between the two: a serious research rig that could be rebuilt as questions changed.

Approach

Ran the year-long build front to back: ideation, component selection, procurement, assembly, software stack. Owned the URDF and integration track end to end.

The platform pairs two UFactory UF850 6-axis arms on a modular Vention pedestal. Perception runs on Intel RealSense D435i wrist cameras for fine-grained close work, a D435f scene camera for workcell-level awareness, and an Ouster OS-0 128 lidar for full-scene context. Compute sits on the column on a Jetson-class board.

Software runs ROS2 Humble end to end. MoveIt2 with OMPL RRTConnect handles motion planning across two planning groups (left and right arm). Custom dual-arm control nodes read the xArm SDK at 100 Hz and publish joint state for both arms; a Rerun bridge logs joint trajectories, end-effector poses, and TF transforms into a web viewer for live observability. The same URDF drives both fake-hardware MoveIt simulation and the live arms, so sim-to-real is a runtime config flip, not a stack swap.

Outcome

  • Working dual-arm research platform live for the team
  • ROS2 Humble + MoveIt2 stack with sim and hardware modes selectable at runtime via a single config file
  • Multi-camera depth perception plus lidar scene awareness; HTTP MJPEG transport for cross-distro Jetson camera bridging
  • URDF and SRDF tuned to the platform’s actual reach envelope (three false-positive collision pairs disabled after diagnosing a 99999-error symmetry bug)
  • Mac development sim handed off to teammates so the platform is iterable from any host without physical arms
  • Foundation in place for the upcoming sister build (mobile-manipulator, in procurement)