Re: [ros-users] using ROS with a new 7-DOF arm hardware

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Author: User discussions
Date:  
To: User discussions
CC: User discussions
Subject: Re: [ros-users] using ROS with a new 7-DOF arm hardware
Thanks. I was hoping Gil would have the full process released that would cover all this soon, but this is goodrich know in case I get this far before that comes out.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 14, 2011, at 11:44 PM, Sachin Chitta <> wrote:

> HI Patrick,
>
> The fifth or sixth entry from a search for "generic kinematics" will throw up this: http://www.ros.org/wiki/arm_kinematics_constraint_aware which is a generic constraint aware kinematics package based on the arm_kinematics package (which itself uses the KDL solvers). Sorry, I don't really know how to get things to go higher in the search results - I think there's an option in the wiki to add keywords but I can't seem to find it right now.
>
> That page and the page for the arm_kinematics package should help out in creating your own kinematics node.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Best Regards,
> Sachin
>
> 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
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>
>
> --
> Sachin Chitta
> Research Scientist
> Willow Garage
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