Vincent Vanhegan

BEng Mechatronic Engineering (Hons)

about

Born and raised in Nottingham, I hold a First-Class BEng in Mechatronic Engineering from Manchester. I work at the intersection of hardware and software, stay active with Kabaddi, Volleyball, and Rock Climbing, and contribute to the community through nature-based volunteering and beekeeping.

6DOF MyCobot 280-Pi Control

Skills

  • Python
  • PyBullet
  • RoboticsToolboxPython
  • ROS2

Goal

Build an autonomous wheeled manipulator capable of pick-and-place of small wooden blocks

What I did

  • A custom motion planning pipeline in ROS 2 (Python) that generated Cartesian end-effector trajectories and solved inverse kinematics along each waypoint using Robotics Toolbox for Python.
  • A collision-checking layer in PyBullet covering both environmental obstacles and arm self-collision, validating trajectories before execution.
  • A ROS messaging and service interface that streamed planned joint states to sync_plan.py on the arm controller for hardware-level execution.

Design Choices

I deliberately avoided MoveIt to reduce computational overhead on the Pi-class hardware and gain deterministic, predictable behaviour. Owning the planning stack end-to-end also made failure modes transparent and far easier to debug than an opaque off-the-shelf planner would have allowed.

GitHub