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17 technical articles

Vision/Inference Control Simulator Embedded/Real-time System Integration Perception/Calibration

Why Our EtherCAT Sync Fell Apart Every 110 Seconds: One Jetson Default, 328 µs to 3.5 µs

Embedded/Real-time

October 10, 2026

Why Our EtherCAT Sync Fell Apart Every 110 Seconds: One Jetson Default, 328 µs to 3.5 µs

Running two servo drives at 1 kHz from a Jetson AGX Orin with the IgH EtherCAT master, the Distributed Clocks (DC) deviation between drives spiked to hundreds of microseconds roughly every 110 seconds. The cause was not the motors, the kernel, or our control code. It was the PTP-TSC hardware lock that NVIDIA's nvpps driver enables at boot. Disabling it with one device tree property cut the maximum DC deviation from 328 µs to 3.5 µs over a 20-minute run.

WIM Robotics Team

Why Raising Friction Made Our Robot Turn Worse: The Geometry of Skid-Steer Scrub

August 21, 2026

Why Raising Friction Made Our Robot Turn Worse: The Geometry of Skid-Steer Scrub

We derive why three weeks of friction-coefficient tuning was doomed from the start — in a skid-steer vehicle's turning-ability ratio, both the friction coefficient and the weight cancel out, leaving only contact geometry. With measured data, plus two hard-earned lessons about trusting simulation instrumentation.

WIM Robotics Team

skid-steervehicle-dynamics

Simulating a Tracked Robot: Why We Deleted the Tracks and Added 12 Invisible Wheels

August 21, 2026

Simulating a Tracked Robot: Why We Deleted the Tracks and Added 12 Invisible Wheels

No physics engine has a native "track" primitive. We share how we modelled a tracked skid-steer robot in Isaac Sim — the failure of a 46-link articulated track, a 4-contact model that turned "perfectly" and was wrong precisely because of it, and the measured 12-contact distributed virtual-wheel model we use today.

WIM Robotics Team

RL-Based Low-Level Motor Control: Beyond PID/ADRC

RL-Based Low-Level Motor Control: Beyond PID/ADRC

In the domain of 1kHz real-time motor control that LLMs cannot replace, we introduce WIM's approach to replacing traditional PID/ADRC manual tuning with reinforcement learning (RL).

WIM Robotics Team

roboticsreinforcement-learning

What is the Real Cost of std::memory_order on ARM64? - Jetson Orin Benchmark

Embedded/Real-time

January 15, 2026

What is the Real Cost of std::memory_order on ARM64? - Jetson Orin Benchmark

We measured whether atomic memory ordering could be a performance bottleneck in a 1kHz RT loop on Jetson Orin (Cortex-A78AE). On AArch64, the cost of seq_cst is virtually identical to release/acquire, and the total cost of 25 atomic operations is less than 0.01% of the 1ms budget.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticsmemory-ordering

The Evolution of Template Matching: From Pixel-Based to Deep Learning

Vision/Inference

January 14, 2026

The Evolution of Template Matching: From Pixel-Based to Deep Learning

An exploration of how template matching technology in computer vision has evolved from pixel-based methods through SIFT/ORB to SuperPoint/SuperGlue. Covers the principles, limitations, and use-case recommendations for each approach.

WIM Robotics Team

computer-visionfeature-matching

January 14, 2026

The Standard Language of Motor Control: CiA402 Profile

This article explains the CiA402 profile, the motor control standard for industrial robots based on EtherCAT and CANopen. It covers the state machine, Controlword/Statusword bit structures, and operation modes with practical examples.

WIM Robotics Team

Lock-free vs Mutex: Robot Control System IPC Performance Benchmark

Embedded/Real-time

January 14, 2026

Lock-free vs Mutex: Robot Control System IPC Performance Benchmark

The factor determining IPC performance in robot control systems is the synchronization mechanism, not process boundaries. We share a case study achieving 100x improvement from 78-103us with Mutex to 0.74-0.82us with Lock-free.

WIM Robotics Team

How Robots Understand 3D Space: Voxels and SDF

Perception/Calibration

January 14, 2026

How Robots Understand 3D Space: Voxels and SDF

Explains Voxel, SDF, TSDF, and ESDF technologies that robots use to represent and understand 3D environments. Covers differences from Point Clouds and practical applications in robot path planning and surface reconstruction.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticssim-to-real

Improving Robot Position Tracking Accuracy: Acceleration Feedforward Optimization Journey

January 13, 2026

Improving Robot Position Tracking Accuracy: Acceleration Feedforward Optimization Journey

We share the process of optimizing acceleration feedforward control for a 6-axis robot arm. By using planner acceleration + LPF instead of numerical differentiation, we achieved 21.2% improvement in position RMSE and torque stability simultaneously.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticscontrol-systems

Validating Robot Friction Compensation Effects

January 12, 2026

Validating Robot Friction Compensation Effects

We validate the effects of friction compensation and acceleration feedforward on a 6-axis collaborative robot through 160 runs of 2x2 experiments. Friction coefficients were tuned using an AI agent (ralph-loop), and validation experiments were conducted with automated scripts. Friction compensation alone achieved 36% improvement (Cohen's d=1.49), accounting for 93% of total improvement.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticsfriction-compensation

1kHz Real-Time Robot Control System Monitoring Architecture

Embedded/Real-time

January 12, 2026

1kHz Real-Time Robot Control System Monitoring Architecture

Design a monitoring architecture that safely collects, stores, and visualizes performance data from EtherCAT-based 1kHz real-time control loops. Maintain RT determinism while capturing debugging data using Lock-free SPSC Queues and ROS2 topic layering.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticsreal-time

Is PREEMPT_RT Enough? Validating Real-Time Performance on Jetson Orin

Embedded/Real-time

December 23, 2025

Is PREEMPT_RT Enough? Validating Real-Time Performance on Jetson Orin

We validate with measured data whether PREEMPT_RT kernel and CPU isolation alone can enable 1kHz EtherCAT control on NVIDIA Jetson Orin. Under GPU, Storage, and EtherCAT load conditions, we achieved max latency below 20us.

WIM Robotics Team

jetsonpreempt-rt

Handling Closed Loop Robots in Isaac Sim

Handling Closed Loop Robots in Isaac Sim

Learn how to resolve issues with closed-loop structures like delta robots and parallel-link grippers that fail to work in Isaac Sim, using Guide Joint and Exclude From Articulation settings.

WIM Robotics Team

isaac-simarticulation

MotoROS2 Point Queue Proxy Server - Breaking the 200-Point Limit

System Integration

January 4, 2025

MotoROS2 Point Queue Proxy Server - Breaking the 200-Point Limit

Learn how to overcome MotoROS2's 200-point trajectory limitation and BUSY response issues on Yaskawa industrial robots through a Proxy Server architecture design and implementation.

WIM Robotics Team

Precision Robot Calibration Using Touch Probe and Kabsch Algorithm

Perception/Calibration

October 28, 2024

Precision Robot Calibration Using Touch Probe and Kabsch Algorithm

A practical guide to achieving sub-0.5mm Sim-to-Real calibration by combining Touch Probe and Kabsch Algorithm to overcome the limitations of vision-based approaches.

WIM Robotics Team

roboticscalibration

YOLO Model Optimization: Achieving 2x Faster Inference on Jetson Orin AGX with TensorRT and DeepStream

Vision/Inference

January 18, 2024

YOLO Model Optimization: Achieving 2x Faster Inference on Jetson Orin AGX with TensorRT and DeepStream

A practical case study on optimizing a PyTorch-based YOLO model using TensorRT and DeepStream for a recycled plastic sorting system, reducing inference time from 15ms to 7ms.

aideep-learning