Tuesday 31 March 2015

Get Me a beer

This is Robbie's first simulation run of picking up a object of a table moving it to another table, then 
returning to his station. The simulation didn't show the object attached to the hand but the hand opens and closes in the right position


Wednesday 11 March 2015

ROS MoveIT Update

I have had Moveit working for a while now but I could never get pick and place work I could
move the arm to a location but that was it. After a bit of research I traced the problem to my
URDF, I didn't place to coordinate frame at the end of the joint and the orientation of the frame
was wrong. After I adjusted everything it worked the arms can now reach more places and the resulting  arm position is more natural. the only real problem is the simple URDF I made for
testing works quicker and has a better result with pick and place(less fails). Next up is a test with
the real robot I have to change the joint configuration on Robbie to match the URDF the wrist yaw joint worked better than the wrist pan joint now the arm has 7 joints plus the gripper not the 8 from before


Wednesday 4 March 2015

Robbie system update

With navigation working as expected now is a good time to upgrade Robbie to the next stable version
ubuntu 14.4 , ROS Indigo and clean up the directory structure. Putting every thing under Robbie_ros.

The good news is most thing works as before the only glitch so far is Arduino 1.6 will mess up my
messenger commands they have to be loaded with Arduino 1.05 and Face recognition is having a problem with opencv

I calibrated battery voltage to read true value, health monitor will move to docking station pose when battery voltage goes below the set level(12.2 for now) and start 
auto dock. I still have to work on the charge state message.

The most important thing to remember running Gmapping before we start localization