Hello everyone. I just wanted to highlight how to safely backdrive your Stretch.
Our Unpowered - Best Practices video demonstrates how the joints can be backdriven when the robot power is off. We recommend applying only moderate forces and speeds when backdriving.
When the robot is powered on, the joints may be backdriven if they are not actively trying to hold a position.
If you need to manually move the robots joints while the robot is powered on we recommend first hitting the runstop button. This will place the joints into a safe mode for backdriving.
NOTE: The robot’s Dynamixel servos may become damaged if you attempt to forcibly backdrive them while they are holding a position. The Dynamixel joints are the head pan, head tilt, wrist yaw, and gripper.
NOTE: Robots with a serial number prior to stretch-re1-1023 will want to install the following software update. This will allow the runstop to place the Robotis servos in a safe backdriving mode.