Dear ROS community,

First of all, I want to thank all developers and contributors very much for all your efforts you put into the ROS project! Two months ago, I started to work with ROS and it was a pleasure to learn it. The wiki, the tutorials and the information provided by the mailing lists allowed me to progress very fast.

I just submitted an enhancement patch (#5063) for the pr2_mechanism_model package, which adds a new helper class for trees. This class is derived from and structured like the one for chains written by Stuart Glaser and Wim Meeussen. I hope, it is a useful contribution. Please let me know, if you like me to apply changes!

To give you an idea, where my motivation comes from and in which context that helper class fits, I would like to give you a short introduction to my work. My intent is also to get into contact with developers, who work on the same or related fields. I would be happy to share ideas, problems and hopefully solutions as well! :-)

I am doing my master thesis on unilateral teleoperation here at PAL Robotics . More specific, I will focus on creating a controller to move the upper body of an humanoid robot. We use Microsoft's Kinect as the input device for the operator's commands.
Similar projects have already been published in the ROS 3D Contest, like Halit Bener SUAY's "Humanoid Robot Control and Interaction" and the various contributions of Taylor Veltrop about "Humanoid teleoperation".
Among the key problems, which I will address in the next four months, are adjustment to different users, joint limit avoidance and optimal configuration(s) concerning expressiveness and precision.
To implement this controller I am working with ROS and KDL. For the above mentioned challenges there is still work to do with the utilised inverse kinematics solvers. Therefore I am also in contact with KDL developers (see related discussions on the KDL-users and KDL-developers mailing list).

So, thanks for taking the time to read this long email and please let me know, if you have any questions and/or you would like me to provide more information about the project. I am looking forward to pool development efforts!


With best wishes from Barcelona,

Marcus Liebhardt