Roy's Picture Gallery

My work involves quite a lot of 3D graphics, and this page is a collection of some of the prettiest pictures I have generated in the course of my work. Everything here has a serious purpose in addition to it's obvious entertainment value.

Fractal Robots

These are rigid-body systems constructed according to fractal patterns. Their serious purpose is for testing dynamics algorithms; but they do look very pretty. I wish I could show you these robots interactively moving in 3D, which is a really amazing sight, but VRML (and/or its browsers) isn't powerful enough. So the best I can offer you is 2D stills and, in one case, a 3D still. Click on an image for a bigger version.


a 625-link unbranched fractal robot in a fractal configuration	the same robot in a different configuration	a 1024-link branched fractal robot

a simple 2187-link unbranched non-fractal robot in a fractal configuration	the same robot in another configuration (magnified)	a 3D version of the above robot (VRML)

Kinematics

Kinematics is the mathematical study of the phenomenon of motion. I am interested in the motion of rigid-body systems in general, and robots in particular.

Here is a 3D animation of a curious mechanism called a Bennett linkage. The movement of this mechanism is most peculiar. Click on the image to get a VRML animation.

Here is an example of a robot performing a simple coordinated motion. There are six joints in total, and their motions combine to make the robot's end-effector (blue) spin around a point in space. In this example, kinematics calculations are used to work out the correct motion for each individual joint so that their combined effect produces the desired motion. The technical term for this is inverse kinematics.