- Authors: Daniel Reuter, Josef Boerding, Erik Zimmermann
- Licence: BSD
- Introduction/Overview
The NIFTi arm is an extension "module" for the NIFTi-UGV, a BlueBotics Absolem [http://www.bluebotics.com/mobile-robotics/absolem/] (http://www.bluebotics.com/mobile-robotics/absolem/ "BlueBotics Absolem"). The arm has 4 degree of freedom. The two main actuators are lifting upper and lower joint to raise a hight up to ca. 1,20 m in addition to the robot hide. On top of the lower joint is a pan-till-unit (PTU) which can carry additional sensors and swivel those into the direction of choice, e.g. cameras. To support an easy replacement of sensors the PTU has 3 active USB 2.0 port available.
- Installation
This software is based on ROS Fuerte http://wiki.ros.org/fuerte. You need also the following packages (partly included here):
- git [http://git-scm.com] (http://git-scm.com)
- nifti_arm_msgs [https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/nifti_arm_msgs] (https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/nifti_arm_msgs)
- dynamixel_msgs, dynamixel_controllers [https://github.com/arebgun/dynamixel_motor] (https://github.com/arebgun/dynamixel_motor)
- diagnostic_updater [https://github.com/ros/diagnostics/tree/groovy-devel/diagnostic_updater] (https://github.com/ros/diagnostics/tree/groovy-devel/diagnostic_updater)
- libcan [https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/libcan] (https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/libcan)
- libepos [https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/libepos] (https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/libepos)
- tulibs [https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/tulibs] (https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/tree/master/tulibs)
You can get the sources by cloning the repository above:
git clone https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm
The package nifti_arm and its dependencies is build with cmake. You can find a tutorial for using cmake here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLvZTyji_Uw.
To build the nifti_arm sources, make sure you have the nifti_arm package directory and its dependencies set correctly in your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable. Change into the checked out directory nifti_arm. Within each of the subdirectories (remake, libcan, libcpc, tulibs, libepos, cpc-usb, cdkl-2.09) execute the following commands:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
sudo make install
After that you can build the nifti_arm:
rosmake nifti_arm
rosmake nifti_arm_demo_gui
If you have the arm installed on your robot you can find in the launch directory different launch files for launching the arm or parts of it.
- Usage
A description of how to install the arm on the robot can be found here https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/blob/master/doc/User%20Manual%20for%20the%20NIFTi-Arm%20v0.2.pdf
To launch the nifti_arm_demo_gui just execute:
roslaunch nifti_arm_demo_gui demo_gui.launch
or if you have the arm installed:
roslaunch nifti_arm_demo_gui demo_gui_with_arm.launch
For further documentation see NIFTi_arm_demo_GUI_instructions.pdf at https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/blob/master/doc/NIFTi_arm_demo_GUI_instructions.pdf
A description of the tf-tree of the arm can be found here https://raw.github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/master/doc/Nifti_arm_tf-tree.PDF
- Report a bug
Please use the issue tracker https://github.com/NIFTi-Fraunhofer/nifti_arm/issues of github to report a bug.