Beginner Topic used frequently in Bottango workflows.
Home Position and Rotation
Robots move. That’s the whole point of a robot! So since robots can be in all kinds of positions and configurations, how do we decide what configuration we should model when creating structures?
The position and rotation you set up when creating structures is the “Home” position and rotation. This is the position and rotation the robot will return to “at rest.” It’s also the position and rotation that the structure will originate from when animated.
Let’s take, for example, a simple animatronic eyeball, controlled by a servo, that can move the pupil left and right and also up and down. The home position of the pupil is probably looking straightforward. With a servo, nothing says it has to be that way; it just probably makes the most sense in your head to think about the neutral position as looking forward, and then as you animate and configure the joints that will move the eyeball, you’ll define how far left, right, up and down it can look.
Let’s take another example: A servo that opens and closes a mouth. In this example, halfway open, right in the middle, probably isn’t what you’d think of as “home” for the mouth. Home for the mouth probably is all the way closed. As you model that structure, you would model it as a closed mouth, that you then open with joints and motors.
So there isn’t always one exact answer for where home is on your robot. You’ll have to decide what makes sense for you, and model towards that. You may also want to keep in mind the eventual home value of the motor you will link later to this joint. For example, a stepper motor may have a more set-in-stone home value than a servo motor, and you may want to model your robot to have home positions the same as the home positions of your real-world stepper motors.