The Goal Of Joints

Essential Topic for learning Bottango.

Big idea

Joints define where and how the virtual simulation of your robot can move. Later you’ll link them to motors to keep the 3D simulation aligned with real-world articulation.

Structures are the bones of your robot. But just like bones, they don’t move on their own. They need muscles (i.e. motors) and joints. BaseExtension will not rotate on its own; it needs to be a child of a joint that rotates.

Joints are the points of articulation in your robot that allow you to configure how your robot moves.

As a reminder, the simple robot we started building in the previous section has three points of articulation:

1. It rotates the yellow base extension on the Y-axis.
2. It rotates the green arm up and down on the X-axis.
3. It opens and closes the blue gripper.

Joints are what we create to define where and how the robot can move. We’ll need at least one joint for each of the three points of articulation above. Eventually we will also connect joints to motors in order to keep the 3D simulation aligned with the real-world robot.