/robot_kinematic_simulation

A purely kinematic simulation of robot manipulators, made for ROS.

Primary LanguageC++MIT LicenseMIT

Robot Kinematic simulation Build Status

This package implements a simple robot manipulator simulation. Only kinematics (joint velocities + positions) are simulated over time, i.e., no dynamics. This makes for a less resource intensive simulation for users that only care about robot kinematics.

Depends on the generic_control_toolbox package.

The simulation accepts a sensor_msgs/JointState message as a command. Joint velocities from the command message are taken as input to the simulation.

The simulated robot will use the kinematics set in the ROS parameter server \robot_description parameter.

Simulation parameters

  • sim_rate: The update rate of the simulated robot. The higher this value is set, the more fine-grained the simulation will be.

  • realtime_rate: The update rate of the simulation. If set to the same value as sim_rate, the simulation will run at real-time. You can set this value to be higher than sim_rate to get a faster simulation. If your computer struggles to run the simulation, try lowering this value.

  • init

    • \joint_names: an array of joint names to be initialized with the simulation. These should match existing joint names in the robot URDF description.
    • \joint_positions: the initial joint positions of the simulated robot.

    An example configuration file is provided in the config directory, which is loaded in the sim.launch launch file. These make use of the Rething Robotics' Baxter description to run, which you can get from here.