I built this catkin workspace for simulating the dual-arm workcell I have been using for my robotic manipulation research. The workcell constitutes two UR3 robot arms equipped with 2F-85 robotiq grippers. The grippers have camera mounted on them manually. I carried out the intrinsic and extrinsic calibrations here. The workcell has a cage with multiple cameras, mainly to provide visual and point cloud data.
The workcell simulation after building its xacro including workscell structure, robots, and grippers.
Here is a closed look on the dual-arm robot
This project is for porting my research studies to be done using ROS and MoveIt. It will also serve as my virtual lab for single arm and dual-arm manipulation planning.
I am planning to do the following with this workcell (short-term)
- Add gripper camera as well as camera to provide PCL data.
- Reproduce the constrained motion planning work.
- Reproduce graph-based motion planning work.
My knowledge to build such systems has been accumulated while working closely with my PhD direct supervisor and friend Dr. Weiwei Wan. It has been a very interesting journey full of exploration, hard work, inspiration, and mutual love for robotic manipulation.
In this project, I built everything from scratch because I love to understand how the internals of ROS work. This is a step towards my aim to actively contribute to robotics open-source software.
If you are interested in the presented work/ideas or if you have any questions, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. We can discuss about this project and other interesting projects.