Services

Plan. Build. Support.

At PickNik, we care about the quality of your robotic application. We listen to your needs and tailor our approach to ensure smooth delivery of highly-quality solutions. Our most popular three services are as follows:

Motion planning icon

Feasibility
Studies & ConOps

Before launching a large project with a new client, we have found it beneficial to conduct a small fixed-price consulting engagement that generates an in-depth Feasibility Study report. This includes a technical analysis, risk assessment, development of milestones, and architecture diagrams. The Feasibility Study allows both parties to test the waters and fully understand each other.

discover more
Motion planning icon

Strategic
Development

Let our team of expert roboticists and software engineers supercharge your research & development. Whether we work embedded within your engineering team or remotely develop an end to end solution to fit your needs, we always deliver the highest quality work and provide exceptional documentation. From our experience, getting hands on with the software provides the most insights and value to you.

discover more
Motion planning icon

MoveIt
Integration

Work with the top experts of the MoveIt Motion Planning Platform on integration with your next manipulation application. PickNik is uniquely qualified to partner with your team on customizing, extending, or improving MoveIt.

discover more

Areas of Expertise

Identification of the best path planning approach

  • Motion planning consulting for leveraging the ideal algorithm for a given application and problem type
  • Benchmarking competing planning approaches for analytical analysis
  • Implementation of novel path planning algorithms and approaches
  • Reviewing current robotics literature and academic surveys for cutting edge solutions
  • Technology readiness level analysis and reporting for motion planning

Probabilistic/sampling based methods

  • MoveIt consulting and development for the popular ROS framework
  • Consulting and development of the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL)
  • Multi-query planners including PRM, LazyPRM, PRM*
  • Single-query planners including RRT, RRTConnect, RRT*, T-RRT, and LazyRRT
  • Asymptotically near-optimal planners including SPARS, SPARS2
  • Projection-based methods including EST, KPIECE, AtlasRRT

Other motion planning methods

  • Trajectory Optimization (TrajOpt)
  • Search Based Planning Library (SBPL)
  • Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Motion Planning (STOMP)
  • Covariant Hamiltonian Optimization for Motion Planning (CHOMP)
  • Dynamic Motion Primitives

Experience-based motion planning

  • Recall and repair of past plans for faster future planning
  • More deterministic results
  • Experts in Thunder and Lightning algorithms as well as the Bolt framework

Planning around static and dynamic obstacles

  • Modeling of static and dynamic environments as “Planning Scenes”
  • Collision aware planning using virtual maps of the environment
  • Continuous collision checking approaches
  • Avoidance of local minimum around obstacles while planning
  • Experts with relevant libraries including the Flexible Collision Library (FCL), Bullet, Octomaps, and the Point Cloud Library (PCL)

Analytic solutions

  • Experts in both computationally and manually generated solutions
  • Closed-form analytic solutions return complete solutions in microseconds
  • 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) and less solvers
  • Consultation on mechanical design of robots

Iterative methods

  • 7 degrees of freedom or more solvers
  • Advice in choosing the best inverse kinematics solvers for your application
  • Experts with off-the-shelf open source KDL, LMA, and TracIK solvers
  • Customize inverse Jacobian methods, gradient projection method, heuristic method, etc.
  • Integrate complex constraints and behaviors in the null space

Multiple arms

  • Implementing IK solvers for arbitrary robot configurations with multiple arms and legs
  • Support for overlapping (shared) joints such as torsos
  • Inverse kinematic solvers that satisfy multiple constraint functions such as stack of tasks and particle swarm optimization
  • Motion planning with underconstrained waypoints that iteratively run IK

Control frameworks

  • Integration and customization of the ROS Control Framework
  • Creation of custom controllers including position, velocity, and force controllers
  • Integration of the OROCOS control framework

Reactive planning

  • Fast planners that are able to react and adjust to a changing environment
  • Dual mode Cartesian and free-space planning algorithms for a wide range of applications
  • System wide performance benchmarking

Grasping

  • Libraries for generating target grasp poses including MoveIt Grasps and GDP Grasping
  • Neural networks for converting camera data to grasp poses
  • Pre-Grasp, Grasp, and Post-Grasp evaluation with heuristic pruning
  • Overall manipulation pipeline development

3D Perception

  • PCL Consulting and integration for the Point Cloud Library
  • Experience with all kinds of camera hardware (monocular, stereo, depth camera, LIDAR)
  • Object detection and image segmentation using deep neural networks
  • Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
  • Point cloud segmentation, point cloud alignment
  • Probabilistic models for visual perception
  • Visual-inertial odometry
  • Experience with Intel Realsense, Microsoft Kinect 2, and Orbbec AstraPro
  • Intrinsic and extrinsic camera calibration

2D Computer Vision

  • OpenCV Consulting and integration for the Open Computer Vision Library
  • Visual servoing tracking of objects for manipulation

Software Architecting With ROS

  • ROS Consulting and best practices for standard ROS paradigms
  • ROS Training for internal development teams new to ROS
  • Historical insights into ROS design decisions and ongoing ROS shortcomings

High-quality ROS packages / ROS stacks

  • Fully ROS-compliant code repository setup with best practices
  • Documented, tested, and code-reviewed deliverables
  • Continuous integration scripts and integration testing
  • Nvidia GPU-enabled Docker containers for multi-platform support
  • ROS C++ style guidelines, roslint, and catkin lint enforcement

We speak fluent ROS 2

  • Expertise in ROS 2 enabling technologies and release status
  • MoveIt 2 experts and original authors of MoveIt for ROS 2
  • Build your application on the next generation of ROS and future-proof your work
  • Utilize industrial-grade features for enterprise systems
  • Improved distributed robotic system support
  • Quality of service guarantees for tough communication environments

We can convert your code with ease

  • Convert your ROS 1 applications and their dependencies to ROS 2
  • Migration to DDS, Colcon, Ament, and Managed Nodes
  • Develop hybrid ROS 1 and ROS 2 projects with the ros1_bridge
  • Close collaboration with the core ROS 2 development team

Mobile base navigation stack

  • ROS Navigation stack integration, customization, and deployment
  • ROS Navigation consulting for tuning parameters and building custom navigation plugins
  • ROS Navigation2 consulting for mobile manipulation and robotics navigation
  • Mobile base path and trajectory planning
  • OpenSlam's Gmapping, Google Cartographer algorithms for SLAM-based tracking
  • ROS-Control framework for switching between simulated and real-world environments
  • Simulated Gazebo system of robot base navigation

Immersive robot visualizations

  • Iterate faster on hardware by testing new designs virtually before physical prototyping
  • Deploy high situational awareness teleop environments
  • Use ROS, Gazebo, and Rviz with off-the-shelf 3D headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift
  • Evaluate and plan your collaborative robot integration strategy in virtual reality
  • Run Unity3D on Windows or Linux

Assembly modelling

  • Setup​ ​Solidworks​ ​assembly​ ​files​ ​to​ ​have​ ​proper​ ​mechanical​ ​mates​ ​and​ ​joint​ ​limits
  • Setup​ ​coordinate​ ​systems​ ​for​ ​DH​ ​parameterization
  • Create​ ​Interface​ ​Control​ ​documents​ ​for​ ​consistent​ ​representation​ ​of​ ​the​ ​robot's​ ​kinematics

URDF generation

  • Convert​ ​CAD​ ​files​ ​to​ ​compliant​ ​URDF​ ​specifications
  • Verification​ ​of​ ​joint​ ​limits​ ​and​ ​appearance​ ​in​ ​Rviz
  • Integrate​ ​inertial​ ​properties​ ​for​ ​simulation​ ​in​ ​Gazebo
  • Integrate​ ​actuator​ ​and​ ​controller​ ​properties​ ​for​ ​ROS​ ​Control

Mesh collision optimization

  • Defeature and reduce mesh complexity
  • Reduce triangle count on meshes
  • Create bounding convex decompositions of meshes
  • Convert to coarse grain geometric primitives for highest speed optimizations

CAD packages

    We​ ​are​ ​currently​ ​compatible​ ​with​ ​the​ ​following​ ​CAD​ ​packages:

  • Solidworks
  • OnShape

Reachability and usability studies

  • Analysis of robot base placement with respect to workspace
  • Determine starting poses for various tasks
  • Reachability Maps
  • Optimal arm placement

Multilingual robots

  • C/C++ for high performance cross-platform code
  • Python: Wrap existing C/C++ functionality in the most common ROS scripting language
  • Matlab: Prototype new algorithms or use codegen to run your code in C as a standalone app

Amazon Robomaker and Microsoft Azure cloud integration

  • Easily develop and deploy robotic fleets at scale
  • Remote monitoring, logging, and control
  • Improved cloud-based visual and speech recognition
  • Simulation service to accelerate application testing

Modern platform-agnostic front-ends

  • Develop React and Python apps to your robotic system
  • Leverage the latest web standards and technologies
  • Remote monitoring via video feeds and full situational awareness
  • Connecting to ROS via rosbridge