Imagine having your own personal assistant robot by your side, helping with daily tasks and allowing you to focus on life’s joys. This futuristic vision is becoming a reality thanks to the innovative work of Dr. Jürgen Baier, CEO of isento GmbH, and his team.
“My firm belief is that in the future, we will have support robots that can take over daily business tasks,” Baier said on PTC’s Third Angle podcast. “In my personal dream, they can find my keys and make my morning coffee, and when I come home from work, the kitchen is clean, and everything is in its place. We want to lead and shape the development towards this idea.”
Baier, a passionate advocate for 3D printing, robotics engineering, and artificial intelligence, has embarked on an ambitious project that combines these cutting-edge technologies: pib, an open-source 3D-printable humanoid robot. Additionally, to make pib a reality, the team uses PTC’s Onshape, an agile CAD system with built-in PDM.
“We hope that community members get so excited about pib that they really want to get involved with our development process and bring pib’s abilities further so that we can one day reach a fully-fledged, smart, humanoid robot,” Baier explained during an Onshape webinar titled, “How isento Uses Onshape to create Pib, the Collaborative 3D-Printable Humanoid Robot.”
The Genesis of pib
The pib project grew out of isento’s work on a machine-learning platform.
“We started to develop a product [around 2020],” Baier said, “where you can do your machine learning training online. In some sense, what Onshape is for CAD, we want our platform to be for machine learning – an online platform where you don’t need to install any software.”
Initially, the team planned to create a simple robotic arm to demonstrate their platform’s capabilities. However, informal conversations around the office sparked a more ambitious vision.
“We realized that we didn’t really want to develop that robotic arm, that gripper, six degrees of freedom, standard industry thing,” Baier said. “It didn't reflect our ambition,"
Instead, the team set their sights on creating a fully functional humanoid robot that could revolutionize daily life.
“I'm convinced that within a few years, robotic assistance will be available that is smart and that can support us in our daily lives at home, in industry, and at work,” Baier said. “And we realized that we want to be a part of it.”
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Collaborative CAD Design with Onshape
Recognizing the enormity of this undertaking, Baier and his team decided to make pib an open-source robotics development project, leveraging the power of a global community. They turned to Onshape, a collaborative CAD design platform built in the cloud to facilitate this collaboration.
“When we started pib, the main idea was to start a community project so that we are the crystallization core of a larger community and distributed community,” Baier said. “We needed a tool for the CAD design that can be accessed from anywhere and where we can share our data.”
Robotics enthusiasts work on pib’s mechanics. (Courtesy: pib.rocks) Onshape’s cloud-native architecture proved ideal for the pib project. Baier highlighted several key advantages:
Real-time Collaboration
“With a live view, we can all share the same view and zoom in to the specific details that we are talking about and thus share the same information and get a very quick idea or a very quick glimpse of the ideas of other community members,” Baier explained.
Branching and Merging
The isento team, originally a group of software developers, can use git-like Branching and Merging workflows software engineers are familiar with.
“In Onshape, we can have branches for every feature,” Baier said. “Then we can develop the features individually and at the end, after a review, merge them together.”
Agile Development Processes
“Using branches and the ticket system where we can work in sprints – where we can have our roadmaps divided into smaller parts – that allows us to simply follow what we are used to in the software world. This is a very simple transfer [of agile processes] to a real-world physical product,” Baier said.
Accessibility
“One of the big advantages of Onshape is that the whole concept behind it supports open-source projects,” Baier said. “pib uses a public document, and members who want to become part of the pib project can open an Onshape account and freely work on pib with a fully featured CAD system.”
pib in Onshape. (Courtesy: pib.rocks) Building the pib Community
Baier and his team created pib.rocks, a dedicated website where enthusiasts can access 3D printing templates, assembly instructions, and connect with other makers to support the growing pib community.
“We provide the part where you can print, and you can download your printable parts. These are zip archives with all the STL files in them. You don't have to export every single file. You can get them all at once,” Baier explained.
The website includes the latest pib news, access to the Discord channel, and information on pib.Labs – physical meetups where people can learn and collaborate hands-on.
“We wanted to come up with the concept of pib.Labs,” Baier said, “as a real-world meeting with people that are excited about pib, meet up, and are able to share their experience.”
Looking to the Future of Robotics Engineering
pib at a pib.Labs meeting. (Courtesy: pib.rocks) As pib continues to evolve, Baier envisions a future where these 3D-printable robots become integral to our daily lives.
“We know it’s a huge vision,” he said. “We hope all these steps will contribute to fostering the community and help everybody end up with a smart, 3D-printable, open-source version of a humanoid robot that can assist and help in our daily lives.”
With its innovative approach to collaborative robotics development, pib represents a significant step toward making advanced humanoid robots accessible to everyone.
As Baier puts it, combining the latest technological advancements, like Onshape, “allows us to use all the agile processes that are well-established, then transfer them to a very new domain – to a very new realm – a humanoid robot developed by a distributed community all over the planet.”
Learn more about this DIY personal assistant robot at pib.rocks.
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