CAD community development

Welcome to our community! It's great that you are here, your contributions are very much needed.

CAD is an integral part of pib. CAD is how we design and create pib’s body, and by joining us, you will help create parts and joints in Onshape. Speaking about Onshape, let’s take a quick detour to know about it

Onshape is a cloud-based 3D CAD (Computer-Aided Design) platform that revolutionizes the way engineers collaborate. It is a virtual design studio where you can create, edit, and share 3D models with teammates, no matter where they are in the world. It's like playing with high-tech Lego blocks online, but instead of toys, you're crafting complex designs for pib. Onshape brings your ideas to life in a fun, interactive, and highly accessible way. It's the future of design at your fingertips! We have selected Onshape due to it being free, full of features and full of collaboration capabilities.

How is pib’s CAD structured?

pib to be represented in CAD is an assembly of different parts with joints in between to represent motion of pib joints. In order to clearly organize this we have multiple levels of assemblies to not clutter the top level assemblu and to ease development or improvement to assemblies. Here is how the assemblies are structured for pib:

As you can see, every humanoid joint has its own assembly which is then grouped in a bigger body part representing a humanoid partition. For part studios, they are arranged in 4 folders representing body partitions; Head, body, arm and hand.

How to develop in CAD?

Our development process is thoroughly explained in this page Community development process . From the CAD side there is a 5 step process, for ease of explanation we will take an example ticket that has been already done and explain how it was done.

Step 1: Read and understand a ticket from the “Ready” column that interests you and matches your skill level. Then assign yourself to it	Step 2: Create a branch from the latest version in Onshape and name it with the ticket name
PR-82 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Step 3: Start designing and modifying the part studio concerning the ticket, in this situation “Forearm”. Add features, edit features and sketches. Organize features in sub folders explaining this group of features. i.e. wrist motorization	Step 4: Use dimensions in variable studio for standard parts (rods-nuts-ballbearings) and name new parts using partNumber featurescript

Step 5: Move ticket to verify by team to discuss in weekly meeting and print it to test the part	Step 6: Merge branch into main branch and create a version named “Merged PR-(ticket number): Ticket name”

After implementing the new designed parts, documentation should be updated including building manuals and printing tutorials.

How to start contributing?

Step 1 (You are here🙂): Read and navigate through this knowledge base to have a good grasp in pib’s CAD development and join Discord to observe how other members develop and interact.

Step 2: Attend weekly rockstar meetings, where we discuss tickets, progress with tasks, brainstorm and create new tasks, onboard new members and chat geeky stuff 😉 (Every Wednesday, 2:30pm CET)

Step 3: Choose 1 of the low priority tickets to start with and walk through the development process, explained above. And don’t forget to reach out in Discord channels and to pibRockstars for any questions💡

Working on the mechanics and CAD of a humanoid robot involves lots of open questions and great opportunities for new additions and findings in such field. We call them pib open questions. We are very welcoming to research groups or universities interested in solving one of these questions as a research project, adding a new question and using pib as a research platform. Even as an individual, you are very welcome to propose or select an open question to base your BSc. or MSc. thesis on.

Mechanical design of a legged platform for pib
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Please reach out by email to us for such technical collaboration opportunities.

XYZ@isento.de