H2Arm - BSP vs PID experiments

Many different methods have been proposed in the control and robotics literature for the control of robotics arms.
Our main aim is to provide a complete software and hardware platform which allow the statistical replication of our results and the experimentation of other more or less sophisticated control strategies and algorithms.

In our work, in order to validate our reproducible research  platform and provide a template methodology for its usage,  we have thoroughly compared in a reproducible way the performance of simple BSP and PID controls when applied to a light-weight, low accuracy and compliant  open source robot arm (H2Arm). BSP significantly outperforms PID on this platform, but not w.r.t. to all metrics.
The findings are interesting by themselves. They also show how easily statistically weak results can lead to qualitatively wrong conclusions, if you cherry-pick results.

The present dataset contains: i) CAD design to 3D-print the H2Arm; ii) experimental data of comparison BSP vs PID; iii) all the code used to perform the experiments (both BSP and PID).

All the data in this repository are linked (and thoroughly documented in the paper "An Experimental Comparison of BSP and PID Controllers for A Simple Visual-servoing Task on a Low-Accuracy Low-Cost Arm" by Fabio Bonsignorio and Enrica Zereik, accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine).