A tab that allows the DART/GRIP simulation environment to emulate a Hubo robot by pretending to be the hardware daemon from hubo-ach. When loaded, it will attach to the necessary state and command channels, feeding commands to the simulated hubo in DART/GRIP and publishing state updates as appropriate.
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hubo-ach-tab depends on dart, grip, ach, and hubo-ach. Another package, hubo-motion-rt, is optional but recommended for ease of use.
DART and GRIP are very unstable. Some hubo-ach-tab users may be happier using fixed releases of dart and grip and living with bugs in the code instead of bugs in the build system. If you want to do this, hubo-ach-tab v0.2 is tagged in the git repository and will work with DART v2.4 and GRIP v2.4.
You can also install bleeding-edge versions of DART and GRIP by compiling from source. In this case, check out, compile, and install the master branches of both, and then use the master branch of hubo-ach-tab.
Ach can be installed from an apt repository, as descbribed on its github page.
Hubo-ach must be built from source. You can find instructions for how to do this on the hubo-ach github page.
hubo-motion-rt provides a useful startup script for hubo-ach and its examples are a simple way to test the functionality of the hubo-ach-tab. Instructions for building and installing these are at their github pages.
All of the dependencies which can be built from source are capable of
building debian packages, allowing them to be cleanly installed and
uninstalled using apt. If you are building from source, this is
strongly recommended. DART and GRIP can build debian packages using
cpack -G DEB, while hubo-ach and hubo-motion-rt can build packages
using dpkg-buildpackage (or pbuilder, if you have it set up). The
resulting debian packages can be installed using dpkg -i.
===
hubo-ach-tab builds using cmake. Once all of the dependencies are installed, clone the repository (and, if you installed tagged versions of DART and GRIP, check out the corresponding tagged version of hubo-ach-tab) and build hubo-ach-tab:
cd hubo-ach-tab
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake ..
make
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The ach channels for controlling hubo and receiving status updates from it must be opened before running hubo-ach-tab. This can be done manually:
sudo ach -1 -C hubo-ref -m 10 -n 3000 -o 666
sudo ach -1 -C hubo-state -m 10 -n 8000 -o 666
but if you've installed hubo-motion-rt, it's much easier to do this using the initscript it provides:
sudo service hubo-motion dart
Once the ach channels are created, you can run hubo-ach-tab.
./HuboAchTab
You now have to instruct the DART/GRIP simulator to load a world with hubo in it. hubo-ach-tab comes with a simple, hubo-only world, which can be found in hubo-models/huboplus-empty-world.urdf. Click File->Load and navigate to your world. Once a hubo-containing world is loaded, hubo-ach-tab will attempt to connect to the necessary ach channels. If it successfully connects, hubo-ach-tab will automatically begin simulating your hubo using the reference positions provided by the hubo-ref channel and publishing its state data to the hubo-state channel. You can now run any hubo-ach program you want and it will behave as normal.
===
Users that are annoyed by make installs are able to install everything
in hubo-ach-tab's dependency tree as debian packages. Packages for DART
and GRIP can be built from source using cpack -G DEB in their build
directory. Packages for hubo-ach and hubo-motion can be built from source
using dpkg-buildpackage. Once the resulting .deb files are installed
using dpkg -i <filename>, a debian package for hubo-ach-tab can be
build and installed using cpack -G DEB and dpkg -i <filename>. This
will additionally install an empty world suitable for use with hubo-ach-tab
into /usr/share/hubo-ach-tab, which hubo-ach-tab will automatically load
and begin simulating at startup.
===
hubo-ach-tab currently supports position control on all of hubo's major joints. It will also report accurate joint positions and velocities. However, there are a few features missing at the moment:
- Control of hubo's fingers
- Control of hubo's head
- Force-torque sensor readings
- Inertial measurement unit reading
There are also some problems with the underlying simulator, the largest of which is that hubo's feet tend to stick to the floor and keep him upright when he really should have fallen over.