Hi Patrick, We are currently actively (as in right this second) developing a tool chain that assists users in configuring and building applications for arm navigation on novel platforms. We're aiming to have all of this working reliably and in a documented fashion in time for the release of e-turtle later this summer. In the meantime, if you are interested in being an alpha tester of this functionality I can send you a rosinstall file and tell you a bit about how the tool chain works - this should definitely be the fastest way to go from a urdf to solving kinematics and generating collision-free trajectories for your arm using our software. This is with the usual caveats that things aren't quite ready for prime-time. To use this new functionality you'll need a urdf and your own joint_trajectory_action, but all the intermediate configuration and launch file generation should be done for you. This also doesn't help configure any of our manipulation stacks - those will not be released at 1.0 in e-turtle. All the documentation, etc will be cleaned up in conjunction with the e-turtle release, and now that we're taking the plunge towards a 1.0 release of major parts of the system things should be substantially more stable as of e-turtle. -Gil -- E. Gil Jones (gjones@willowgarage.com) Research Engineer Willow Garage, Inc. 68 Willow Road Menlo Park, CA 94025 650.475.9772 On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Patrick Beeson wrote: > I'm attempting to try and utilize novel, custom-made 7-DOF modular arm > hardware with ROS, and I'd like any help people are willing to provide > in starting from scratch with getting a new arm working in ROS.  I > have lots of familiarity with ROS, writing ROS drivers for perception > and navigation hardware, but, I'm not a manipulation or kinematics > expert, and I'm having difficulties understanding exactly what I do > and do not need to implement on my end to use the move_arm high level > package. > > Having previously used the navigation stack, and other such stacks,  I > assumed that I would need some sort of driver that would subscribe to > some topic that would send joint positions or velocities based on > higher level kinematics planning given URDF models of the joints. > Instead, what I found was this tutorial: > http://www.ros.org/wiki/arm_navigation/Tutorials/Running%20arm%20navigation%20on%20non-PR2%20arm, > which seems to imply the need for writing my own kinematics plugin in > addition to my own joint trajectory execution node.  I can certainly > do this given some time; however, previous emails implied a > generic_kinematics package in unstable that would be useful, but after > searching through the Subversion repository, a generic_kinematics > package does not exist anywhere. > > So, I'm going to start my creating a joint_trajectory_execution node > that has a a joint_trajectory_action interface and does soft-realtime > control of my joints behind the scenes.  What I need help determining > is if/where any generic kinematics packages exist or if I need to > write my own for my arm.  If I need to write my own, more details on > how to get this working with the other relevant modules would be > useful.  If a generic package exists, where is it?  How do I feed it > the model of my arm?  Also (tutorial step 5) there are lots of other > bits and pieces lying around that need to get tied together that > aren't well documented.  All in all, what I need is a better tutorial > that gives a much more simplified explanation as to what pieces are > needed, how they fit together (from move_arm down to hardware > interface), what parameters are definitely needed and which can be > ignored, etc. > > Any help on this would be appreciated.  I'm sure I could figure all of > this out given enough time, but these days, time is not a great luxury > that I have, and part of the reason I use ROS is that it has been easy > to create, use, swap nodes, messages, topics with relative ease.  the > ARM documentation however is quite lacking and the large number of > motion planning, kinematics, controller, and action modules are not > well documented as to what is deprecated, how things fit together, > etc. > > Thanks in advance, > > Patrick > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing list > ros-users@code.ros.org > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users >