travers-rhodes / ada

Software for ADA, the Assistive Dextrous Arm developed by the Personal Robotics Lab at CMU.

Ada

Ada (or Assistive Dextrous Arm) is a package for controlling the Mico robot arm through the Personal Robotics pipeline. It is a high-level package, pulling from ROS, OpenRAVE, and other lower-level parts of the system. At the highest level, it provides scripts for controlling the robot, planning trajectories, finding inverse kinematics solutions, and more.

Installation

The following rosinstall can be used to get the minimum dependencies required to use AdaPy in simulation:

First, be sure to clone https://github.com/HARPLab/harplab-rosinstalls.git into somewhere like ~/harplab-rosinstalls. If it's already there, make sure it's up to date. Then, run

$ wstool merge ~/harplab-rosinstalls/ada-sim.rosinstall 

If you plan to connect to the real robot, then you will need a larger set of dependencies:

$ wstool merge ~/harplab-rosinstalls/ada.rosinstall

Compilation

Be sure you've run all the steps at https://github.com/HARPLab/harpdocs/blob/master/software_machine_setup.md in order to set up your machine with the required packages to compile this.

Set up the udev rules

Create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-jaco.rules with the content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor} =="22cd", MODE="0666", GROUP="pr", SYMLINK+="mico"

Running Ada

You use ada in your script by simply calling the initialize function:

env, robot = adapy.initialize()

Connect to the robot

To connect to the robot, run the launch script:

roslaunch ada_launch default.launch

You may have to re-launch several times before the robot will connect. This will also start up all the controllers.

Run a test script

Now, run the test script:

rosrun adapy test.py

Play around

This will open up a python console that you can use to send commands to the robot. See prpy for more info.