Kumonoito

Kumonoito is the silken spidery thread that takes one from Drake to ROS and back. This thread, cast by the Great Warrior Gesar (Russ Tedrake) was woven in the hidden land of Drake-Shambhala where Buddhist values and traditions rule and can lead the hordes of the righteous but damned (Drake Developers) to climb up towards salvation (ROS / LCM interoperability).

More practically, this repository exemplifies Drake simulations and systems that communicate via ROS and LCM messages.

Organisation, Setup and Install

Currently, this repo is setup with 4 Drake Systems that enable ROS messaging communication : A RosPublisherSystem, a RosSubscriberSystem, a RosJointStatePublisher, and a TfPublisherSystem. It also includes a couple of simulation demos that utilize these systems in various ways and the associated models needed to run these simulations.

Kumonoito is currently developed for and tested with ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu 16.04

Install

Kumonoito depends on ROS and Drake.

1. Install ROS Kinetic.
2. Install Drake as a library. Kumonoito is currently tested with a locally built Drake library. To build Drake as a library,
   • Navigate to $<drake-dir>
   • Run bazel run //:install -- $<drake_lib_dir>
3. Clone Kumonoito:
   • Create a catkin workspace somewhere is your filesystem:
     • source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
     • mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
     • catkin_make
   • Download Kumonoito repository into the catkin workspace
     • cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
     • git clone https://github.com/naveenoid/kumonoito.git
4. Build catkin packages:
   • cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make install

Demo Description / Setup

There are 2 demos available by default in Kumonoito and they are to some extent meant to be exemplary. These demos are built around the "Robotable" setup that consists of 2 Kinova Jaco Arms mounted to one side of a custom table. A few objects of interest for manipulation experiments are placed on the surface. The two projects are a (i) Passive "Monolithic" Sim of 2 Kinova Arms, and a (ii) Controlled RoboTable sim that responds to trajectory commands via ROS Messages (Note that controlled version message listening version is WIP - it currently is a monolithic style demo).

Demo Setup

1. Install Kinova ROS Package (Note that only the kinova_description project is required at this stage).
   • git clone https://github.com/Kinovarobotics/kinova-ros /tmp/kinova-ros
   • cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
   • cp -a /tmp/kinova-ros/kinova_description/ .
   • cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make install

Demo Execution

1. Setup enviroment variables and extra ROS packages
   • DRAKE_RESOURCE_DIR export DRAKE_RESOURCE_ROOT=<drake_lib_dir>/drake/
   • ROS and catkin source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash and source ~/catkin_ws/install/setup.bash
   • Install auxiliary packages apt-get install -y ros-$ROS_DISTRO-rviz ros-$ROS_DISTRO-robot-state-publisher
2. For launching the passive demo:
   • roslaunch <catkin_ws>/kumonoito/launch/passive_multi_jaco_sim.launch
   • Once launched, if there are no problems, on the rviz window you should see the robot-table visualized on rviz and the 2 kinova Jaco arms falling passively. Various objects have been placed on the table.
3. For launching the controlled demo:
   • roslaunch <catkin_ws>/kumonoito/launch/controlled_robot_table_sim.launch
   • if there are no problems, on the rviz window you should see the robot-table visualized on rviz and the 2 kinova Jaco arms move to an arbitrarily specified position in space. Various objects have been placed on the table.

Special note for both demos: Both demos simply publish to 1 kinova arm and the second arm uses a remap of the appropriate messages to render the same behaviour. This has been set for purely cosmetic reasons and a version with 2 independently controlled arms is WIP.