[ros-users] Getting /smart_arm_controller/state from the UA Smart Arm Controller

[Patrick Goebel]

Hi Anton,

I do have two followup questions for when you have the time:

1. It would be nice to enumerate the joint names from the parameter
server so as to avoid hard coding them in several places.  But at the
moment, all the joint controllers hang off the root namespace.  I tried
placing them all under their own namespace (e.g. "/ax12_controllers") by
using the "ns" keyword in the launch file, but when I did that, the
controller_spawner.py node would just hang instead of firing up the
various controllers.  Hope that makes sense!

2. Suppose I want to start with a very simple inverse kinematics problem
without doing the full arm navigation stack. All I want to do is place
the tip of the hand of my robot at various places in space without
regard to the orientation of the hand.  Is it possible to have the arm
kinematics solve just this 3-DOF IK problem rather than the full 6-DOF
IK problem?

Thanks!
patrick