Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By : Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph
Book Image

ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

By: Anil Mahtani, Aaron Martinez, Enrique Fernandez Perdomo, Luis Sánchez, Lentin Joseph

Overview of this book

This learning path is designed to help you program and build your robots using open source ROS libraries and tools. We start with the installation and basic concepts, then continue with the more complex modules available in ROS, such as sensor and actuator integration (drivers), navigation and mapping (so you can create an autonomous mobile robot), manipulation, computer vision, perception in 3D with PCL, and more. We then discuss advanced concepts in robotics and how to program using ROS. You'll get a deep overview of the ROS framework, which will give you a clear idea of how ROS really works. During the course of the book, you will learn how to build models of complex robots, and simulate and interface the robot using the ROS MoveIt motion planning library and ROS navigation stacks. We'll go through great projects such as building a self-driving car, an autonomous mobile robot, and image recognition using deep learning and ROS. You can find beginner, intermediate, and expert ROS robotics applications inside! It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Effective Robotics Programming with ROS - Third Edition ? Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming ? ROS Robotics Projects
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Preface
Bibliography
Index

Interfacing seven DOF Dynamixel based robotic arm to ROS MoveIt!


In this section, we will discuss a 7 DOF robot manipulator called COOL arm-5000, which is manufactured by a company called ASIMOV Robotics (http://asimovrobotics.com/). The robot is built using Dynamixel servos (http://www.robotis.com/xe/dynamixel_en). We will see how to interface a Dynamixel-based robotic arm to ROS using dynamixel_controllers.

The following is a diagram of a COOL arm-5000:

Figure 15 : COOL Arm illustration.

COOL arm robots are fully compatible with ROS and MoveIt! and are mainly used in education and research. The price range is between 5K - 10K USD.

Following are the details of the arms:

  • Degree of Freedom: 7 DOF
  • Types of Actuators: Dynamixel MX-64 and MX-28
  • List of Joints: Shoulder Roll, Shoulder Pitch, Elbow Roll, Elbow Pitch, Wrist Yaw, Wrist Pitch, and Wrist Roll
  • Payload: 5K
  • Reach: 1 meter
  • Work Volume: 2.09 m3
  • Repeatability: +/- 0.05 mm
  • Gripper with 3 fingers
  • ROS support

Creating a controller package for COOL arm...