Personal project: gripper and welder integrator hold_and_weld
Helloo people I built a dual-arm robotic welding workcell as a personal project. One arm holds the workpiece, the other welds.
Main components:
* Grasp sampler: constraint-aware antipodal grasp sampling on exact CAD surfaces via OCCT. Exclusion zones (weld seams, screw holes) and others are defined before sampling starts. Mesh support is planned.
* Weld planner: seam extraction from CAD (OCCT) and mesh (CGAL) geometry, outputs weld paths as JSON. Configurable.
* Application layer: lifecycle action servers, custom Ceres-based IK stack for seam approach validation, dual-arm coordinator. The kinematics stack is designed to eventually support pose finding for cleaner OMPL→Pilz handoff.
Still PoC stage but the full pipeline runs; STEP file to dual-arm execution in simulation. Roadmap and known limitations are in the repo.
Current weak points: the mesh pipeline in the weld planner is fragile; parameter sensitive and not validated on complex geometry yet, but I have found credible approaches in the literature to improve it.
The grasp sampler has a couple of minimal chokepoints that are straightforward to fix.
MoveIt's lack of lifecycle support required workarounds and concurrency handling still needs work. Visuals are also due an update (especially gripper).