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How to carry out simple pick and place operation using a simple planar robotic arm with a two finger gripper in Gazebo without relying on ROS?

I created a simple 3 joint robotic arm in Gazebo, and added a gripper while trying to follow the Gazebo tutorials.

I am trying to replicate a very simple pick and place operation where I just provide the pose of the object of interest and try to have the arm pick and drop it somewhere else.

However, I am not sure of how to get the gripper control working. I discovered this plugin https://github.com/JenniferBuehler/gazebo-pkgs/tree/master/gazebo_grasp_plugin

which might help but there's no documentation for it. I am going through the code but I am mostly used to working in ROS (beginner level) and that too python.

So I am learning to do this with just Gazebo (my own personal goals and plans to build on this project) and improve my C++.

How do I utilize the above plugin and make it pick and drop an object? In ROS it would essentially boil down to creating nodes that subscribe to specific topics, share the pose information, and utilize that for specific calls to the plugin for the gripper to carry out an action. Just having some trouble understanding the structure without the ROS part here with Gazebo.

Would appreciate any suggestions on this!

System - Ubuntu 16.04

Asked by sj90 on 2018-02-12 04:04:43 UTC

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Answers

The documentation for this plugin is here !!

In order to make use of this plugin, you need to load your robot using URDF file.

Correct me if I am wrong but the Gazebo tutorials show how to build robot with URDF format. You can check this tutorial, to learn about URDF in Gazebo.

So the steps for using this plugin are :

  1. Follow the installation procedure described here ( NOTE: it is prerequisite to have installed ROS(indigo or kinetic) and have catkin workspace)

  2. Modify your robot's URDF as said in the tutorial

  3. Run Gazebo and spawn your robot (from urdf).

I use to run gazebo with roslaunch and that gives me information on the terminal when the specified object is attached to the gripper. I don't know if this output comes also with normal gazebo startup.

Asked by klapetos on 2018-02-14 14:34:44 UTC

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Thank you, but as I said I don't wish to use ROS with this and am looking for help from that perspective. The plugin is mostly utilized with ROS, yes. But the code in itself doesn't use ROS and that makes me think it can be used with just Gazebo. I just don't know how to do that.

Sorry, but didn't find your answer helpful here. Maybe there's no way to use this with just Gazebo, which makes things difficult for me. Thanks again.

Asked by sj90 on 2018-02-15 04:52:37 UTC