Your first Solarian robot
By the end of this tutorial you have a simulated robot: a six-joint arm you wrote yourself, a gripper installed from a plugin, and a wrist camera whose picture shows up in the controller. You move it with the keyboard. No hardware yet.
Loading MuJoCo model…
The robot this tutorial builds: the SO-106 arm, the UMI Slim gripper on its flange, and the camera on the gripper, looking along the fingers. Each label is the module's name in the project.
The project is called so106, and every later tutorial continues it. Do the chapters in order. Each one ends with something you can see.
Before you start
Finish Installation, including the simulation extra:
pip install "solarian[sim]"
Check the two commands exist:
solarian --help
create-solarian --help
solarian --help should print a command list. create-solarian --help should print the scaffolder's usage. If either command is missing, the install did not put scripts on your PATH.
What you will add, and in which order
- An empty project, and a tour of the files. Create a project.
- The robot and its first module, the arm: six joints, a config file, a MuJoCo model in a scene. The Robot.
- The messages between robot and controller. Observations & Actions.
- A controller you drive with the keyboard. The Controller.
- The sim window, and the arm actually moving. Move it.
- A gripper from a plugin, mounted on the flange. The gripper.
- A camera, and its picture in the controller. The camera.
Three ideas are worth having before the first command. A module is one device (arm, gripper, camera). A plugin is a package that ships a module or a driver you did not write. The three processes — relay server, robot, controller — are how a Solarian app runs, even when all three are on your laptop. Tutorial 1 is the longer version of the robotics words.
You will keep three terminals open for the rest of the course. Get used to restarting the robot and the controller after a code change. The server can stay up.