ROSRagnarEDU

ROS interface for Ragnar EDU

Dependencies

ROS Ragnar depends on the following core packages:

1. industrial_core
2. rviz

Please note that all terminals need to be sourced in your current workspace

Please note that you will need the most recent versions of the debians for 'robot_state_publisher' as of 24 Nov, 2015. Please 'apt-get update' if you have not

Please note that you will need an RViz version > 1.11.8

Simulation

If you want to simulate the robot:

roslaunch ragnar_support simulate.launch

This simulation listens to the same joint_path_command topic that the driver does and can be commanded to move in the same way.

General Bringup

If you want to bringup the robot state listener, the command interface, and visualization:

roslaunch ragnar_support bringup.launch [robot_ip:=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] [state_port:=xxxx]

The ip defaults to 192.168.1.240 and the state port defaults to 11002.

Feedback and Visualization

To launch a node that will listen to the robot feedback:

roslaunch ragnar_drivers ragnar_state_listener.launch [robot_ip:=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]

Note that the ip for this node defaults to 192.168.1.240

Command Interface

To launch a node that enables commanding the robot to follow trajectories:

roslaunch ragnar_drivers ragnar_streaming_interface.launch robot_ip:=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Note that the robot listens on the joint_path_command topic with type trajectory_msgs::JointTrajectory

Demonstrations

After these other components have been launched, you may run a test script with:

rosrun ragnar_kinematics ragnar_demo_motions 

Please note that these motions may be unsafe

Outstanding Issues

This package is still in development, and requires a few components to be workable:

1. The robot needs a ROS action server interface so that client programs can be aware of the state of robot motion
2. The robot needs safety checks. There may be mechanical limits that dissallow certain joint configurations. If these are not caught by the kinematics routines or by a simple bounding box check on the work volume, they may damage the robot.
3. The robot now plays nicely with other geometry in URDF files, but there are still some outstanding issues with JointState messages that come from other scene geometry. Ragnar state publisher assumes the first four joints that come in are meant for it. To fix this, and a few other issues, we need to identify standard names.

There are more issues, but these are the big, oustanding ones. We welcome issues and pull-requests to make this software better.