(Needs updating to refer to refer to launch files etc.)
HackSpace Robotics Development Platform http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Project:HSRDP
Current status: Can play around with visualisation of the robot model though the URDF
A robotics project aiming to build a robotic platform for hackers to play around with higher level functions and make the robot do cool things.
Based on ROS (groovy), please reffer to http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation for installation instructions.
Assuming you've installed ROS following the guidelines on the website linked above you need to make sure the environment variables are setup correctly, as such run source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash after catkin_make in the catkin_ws directory
Once installed pull the repository into your catkin workspace (e.g. ~/catkin_ws/src/umi_rtx_100/src) then
run with
roslaunch simulate.launch model:=umi_rtx_100.urdf gui:=true
Running roscore will save the time as the launch files won't have to keep bringing it up and down at the time. I prefer to run it in a screen session for this purpose
Run ros_core on your machine
Then connect the arduino to the USB port and run
rosrun rosserial_python serial_node.py /dev/ttyACM0 changing the last parammeter depending on which TTY port your aruduno serial is connected to.
It should show something like:
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047127.723874] ROS Serial Python Node
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047127.733935] Connecting to /dev/ttyACM3 at 57600 baud
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047130.150050] Note: publish buffer size is 512 bytes
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047130.150891] Setup publisher on arm_encoders [std_msgs/Int16MultiArray]
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047130.157397] Note: subscribe buffer size is 512 bytes
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047130.157971] Setup subscriber on arm_controller/arm_encoder_targets [std_msgs/Int16MultiArray]
[INFO] [WallTime: 1453047130.162863] Setup subscriber on gripper_controller/gripper_encoder_target [std_msgs/Int16]
If instead you are getting out of sync errors then this try running the serial monitor on the port in the Arduino IDE, TODO still need to find out why this happens If you are getting failed packet headers then it's most likely due to an arduino/ros version mismatch so make sure the right version of rosserial_python is installed and sourced.
At this point the raw encoder readings should be published into ROS You can view them by running rqt_plot with:
rosrun rqt_plot rqt_plot /arm_encoders/data[0],/arm_encoders/data[1],/arm_encoders/data[2],/arm_encoders/data[3],/arm_encoders/data[4],/arm_encoders/data[5],/arm_encoders/data[6]
This will plot the raw encoder values onto a plot at 5Hz by default, you can also use roslaunch with roslaunch plot.launch
To tell the arduino the target positons of encoders on the commandline you can use the following:
rostopic pub /arm_controller/arm_encoder_targets std_msgs/Int16MultiArray '{layout: {dim: [], data_offset: 0}, data: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, -375]}'
Or alternatively moving specific joints (the rest default to their init value) using roslaunch, with j1 being the up/down joint and j7 being the gripper
roslaunch move.launch j1:=1000