Tools for composable robot models

This repository contains tools for transforming composable robot models.

Installation

The common requirements include:

For the visualizer the following requirements must be satisfied:

Graphviz

The code generator requires:

Getting started

Check out this repository and the repository for the modelling tutorial on composable models to the same directory.

Using the visualizer

The visualizer first performs a model-to-model transformation from the composable models to a DOT graph description model. Execute this transformation by running the following command in this repository:

python visualizer.py

Afterwards a model.dot file should have been generated that can simply be converted to a PDF, PNG and SVG file by executing the Makefile:

make

This will produce a similar output to what is shown in the following Figure 1.


Figure 1: Possible model visualization

Using the code generator

To use the code generator first run the following command:

python code_generator.py

The output will be created in the gen/ directory. Thus, change into that directory and execute the Makefile to compile the generated KDL code:

make

This will produce an executable which can be run by

./kdl_gen

For the tutorial setup it will simply print the specified and computed kinematics as shown similar to the following output:

  pose_link1_joint1_wrt_link1_root: 
  [[           0,           0,           1;
               0,           1,           0;
               1,           0,           0]
  [            1,           2,           3]]
  pose_link2_root_wrt_link1_joint1: 
  [[   -0.416147,   -0.909297,           0;
        0.909297,   -0.416147,           0;
               0,           0,           1]
  [            0,           0,           0]]
  pose_link2_root_wrt_link1_root: 
  [[           0,           0,           1;
        0.909297,   -0.416147,           0;
       -0.416147,   -0.909297,           0]
  [            1,           2,           3]]

For each of the three poses the first 3x3 values represent the orientation matrix while the last three values represent the position vector.

Acknowledgement

This work is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme SESAME under grant agreement No 101017258.