In this tutorial, we will show you how to configure and remotely control PhantomX Pincher Robot connected to the Rover.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to configure and remotely control PhantomX Pincher Robot connected to the Rover.
The PhantomX Pincher AX-12 Robot Arm is a 4 degree-of-freedom robotic arm and an easy addition to the TurtleBot ROS robot platform. This hardware kit comes with everything needed to physically assemble and mount the arm as a standalone unit or as an addition to your Turtlebot Robot/mobile platform. [source: trossenrobotics.com]
The arm has been redesigned to fit Leo Rover mounting plate. As the arm baseplate has became thinner, its range allows to grab objects from the ground as well as reach the rear and sides of Leo Rover.
You'll follow the official instructions from Trossen Robotics' website to assemble the arm with only few exceptions that are specific to Leo Rover mounting interface.
PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm Assembly Guide
Learn Robotics!
To properly communicate with the Dynamixel servos, you will need to set the servo IDs like in the picture below:
To do this, you can follow our guide for the Arbotix controller here:
ArbotiX-M Robocontroller
/integrations/arbotix-m-robocontroller
In there, you will also find how to configure and use the arbotix ROS driver.
The pincher_arm packages contain very useful utilities for PhantomX Pincher arm, such as:
To use these features, you will need to install these packages on your Rover (to run the arm driver) and on your computer (to control the arm remotely).
Make sure you have ROS installed:
Install ROS on your computer
/development-tutorials/ros-development/install-ros-on-your-computer
then type in the terminal:
Replace <distro> with the ROS distribution you have installed on your computer (e.g. melodic).
Make sure your Rover is connected to the Internet:
Connect to a local network and the Internet
/basic-guides/connect-to-the-internet
You will only need packages that are required to start the arm driver:
If for some reason you want to build the packages manually, you can use the instructions below (both for the Rover and your computer).
Create an empty catkin workspace, if you don't have one yet:
Clone the packages into the source space:
Install the dependencies:
Build the workspace:
Source the result space:
You can start by testing if the driver runs properly.
Use roslaunch to start the arm controllers:
roslaunch pincher_arm_bringup driver.launch --screen
If everything started without errors, you should see new topics spawned (e.g. with rostopic list) to which you can send position commands:
as well as services for setting speed and relaxing joints.You can learn more about them in the ArbotiX-M Robocontroller tutorial.
The driver will also provide controllers for FollowJointTrajectory and GripperCommand actions (see the actionlib wiki for more information).
Now that you confirmed that the driver works, you can integrate it with the main Leo launch file and the URDF description.
Open the /etc/ros/robot.launch file in your favorite editor (e.g. nano) and add these lines before the closing </launch> tag:
Next, you will need to extend the robot's URDF description, by embedding the arm's description and adding a fixed joint between Leo and Pincher arm. To do this, edit /etc/ros/urdf/robot.urdf.xacro by adding these lines before the closing </robot> tag:
Restart the leo service to apply the changes:
You will need to have ROS properly configured on your computer to communicate with the nodes running on your Rover. To learn how to do this, you can follow Connecting other computer to ROS network section of ROS Development tutorial:
ROS Development
/development-tutorials/ros-development
To visualize the position of the arm in RViz, just type:
To test Motion Planning with MoveIt! :