hhuaibo / arm-ik

An Inverse Kinematics 6DOF Robot Arm Pick and Place Project in ROS.

Robotic Arm - Pick & Place Project

This is my turn-in code as partial fulfillment of Udacity's Robotics Nanodegree. I wrote code to calculate the joint angles of six degree-of-freedom Kuka Kr210 serial manipulator given the position an orientation of its end effector in 3-D space. This code is used by the robot arm in a simulator to pick cylinders in a shelf and drop it in a bin. The simulation is implemented in a ROS environment with Gazebo and Rviz.

Notes

• You can find the write up of the thought process in the link below

• • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/WRITEUP.pdf

• You may also be interested in the following Jupyter notebooks:

• • Exposition of the inverse kinematics thought process
• • • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/joint_angles_ik_exposition.ipynb
• • Optimization of the inverse kinematics process
• • • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/joint_angles_ik_optimized.ipynb
• • Derivation of the transforms used in the inverse kinematics process
• • • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/total_transform.ipynb
• • Exposition of Euler angles and how to get the last three angles
• • • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/playground/euler-angles.ipynb

Dependencies and Setup

• Install ROS on a computer with Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial

• • http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu

• Clone Udacity's original repository

• • https://github.com/udacity/RoboND-Kinematics-Project

• Replace IK_server.py in ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts with the following script below:

• • https://github.com/mithi/arm-ik/blob/master/IK_server.py

• Follow the instructions as indicated in the README of the original repository

Usage

• Make sure the demo flag is set to "false" in inverse_kinematics.launch file under /RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/launch

• Launch the project

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ ./safe_spawner.sh  

• On a separate terminal, run the inverse kinematics script

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ rosrun kuka_arm IK_server.py