Clearpath Robotics and Thalmic Labs Join Forces for New Autonomous Robot



By Priya Potapragada



Clearpath Robotics, partnered with Thalmic Labs, announced today that they have successfully tested the alpha unit of a gesture-controlled robot. The Myo Gesture Control armband developed by Thalmic Labs was combined with Clearpath Robotic’s Husky unmanned ground vehicle to start, stop and drive the vehicle using simple arm movements.



According to the company’s press release, to integrate the Myo armband with the Husky, Clearpath Robotics used the Robot Operating System. The Husky software package has a standard Twist interface, so the team had to convert the Myo data into that format to make the two compatible using their experimental cross-platform serialization server in socket mode. 



The team then determined proper mapping from the Myo data to the robot velocity using timeouts and velocity limits to complete the integration.



Clearpath Robotics is eager to keep testing robots with Thalmic Labs, said a company press release. “There are a lot of interesting applications for using the Myo for robot control, and our team is very excited to have the opportunity to work with the Alpha dev unit,” said Ryan Gariepy, chief technical officer at Clearpath Robotics.