superchicko: A C++ repository from rsthomp

Superchicko Rviz Plugin

Generate superchick urdf like

rosrun xacro xacro src/superchicko/superchick/superchick.xacro > superchick.xacro

Novalis Rviz Plugin

Then run urdf like longhorn cattle, aka

	roslaunch superchick display.launch model:=superchick.urdf

run novalis like

	roslaunch superchick display.launch model:=src/superchicko/superchick/novalis.xacro

Example Display in Rviz

Planning works in MoveIt!

run moveit! like:

	roslaunch supermove_config demo.launch

If you run into runtime errors, be sure to install ros-<distro>-moveit-ros-visualization from the ubuntu repos

To run simulation of head in move it:

	roslaunch supermove_config moveit_planning_execution.launch

Point CLouds from Vicon

Written in rospy, this transforms each of the markers placed on superchick/Superdude into an array of four points (since we use four markers).

The twist of the head, as computed in vicon_listener, is used to generate a geometry_msgs/TransformStamped Object. The topic the Superdude markers are published on (e.g. /vicon/Superdude/root) contains the twist info. Since /vicon/markers contains the translation of each marker in the world, I used the /vicon/markers points to generate the clouds and compute the directions of the point cloud objects with respect to the twist information about the center of the face. The result is published as /vicon_clouds for onward streaming into move-it for real-time control. Below is an example cloud from the four points on the head transformed into a sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 object.

@TODO:

To deploy on real robot, pass arg sim as true. This will launch the superchick/launch/robot_interface.launch file that brings the robot alive.

Changelog

Added moveit demo run instructions to readme Sept 28, 10:44pm (LKN)
Added cloud info to readme (Oct 6)

Known Issues

Having issues importing rospkg

When launching the xacro generated urdf files in superchicko, the system complains it cannot find rospkg? This is because Anacoda installs nmesses up the PYTHONPATH variable so that even if rospkg is listed in /usr/lib/python/distpackages, the ros interpreter doesn't know which version of python to use. One way to solve this is to comment out the python path that is automatically imported in bash (didn't work for me for some reason) or to manually reinstall python and associated dependedncies e.g. wxPython and then manually export the installation path to you r LD_LIBRARY_PATH

	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/robotec/Documents/wxPython-src-3.0.2.0/bld/lib:/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

	export PYTHONPATH=/home/robotec/Documents/wxPython-src-3.0.2.0/wxPython:$PYTHONPATH

libompl.so issues

When having issues with loading libompl.so.10 with movegroup node, doing the following after installing ompl with the bash script from bitbucket solved my problem on the robotec machine.

	sudo cp /opt/ros/indigo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libompl.so.10 /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

rsthomp/superchicko