cwru_abby Package

This package supports the mobile manipulator platform at CWRU composed of an Invacare mobile base and an ABB IRB-120 industrial manipulator.

The robot was named ABBY.

The package is composed of several ROS Packages developed for a masters thesis with ROS Fuerte. It has been updated to support use in simulation with ROS Melodic and Noetic.

Most packages have not been updated. Specifically, they still use the manifest.xml package specification file. (rosdep does not seem to play well with that.)

The updates focus on abby_description

abby_description

The abby_description package contains the description of the robot and the ability to simulate the robot.

The ABB IRB-120 manipulator model is visible in RVIZ, but it does not appear to function in simulation. The description for the ABB manipulator is in the abb_common package contained swri-ros-pkg directory.

Launch Simulation

The simulation can be started with the following command:

roslaunch abby_description abby_simulation.launch

Simulation Parameters

The abby_simulation.launch file has the following parameters:

• model: The model to use for the simulation. Only abby is currently available. [abby]
• filename: The absolute path of a model to use.
• teleop: Whether/which teleoperation interface to use. There are teleoperation interfaces used existing support for joystick, keyboard, and the rqt_robot_steering GUI. [none|joystick|keyboard|rqt]
• world: The full path to an alternate world file.
• physics: The physics engine to use for the simulation. This is passed to Gazebo. Currently, only ODE and Bullet are supported. '[ode|bullet]'
• paused: Whether to begin the simulation paused. '[false|true]'
• gui: Whether to start an RVIZ display. '[false|true]'
• joy_dev: The joystick device file to use. '[/dev/input/js0]'

To start a simulation that can be teleoperated using at joystic, use the following command:

roslaunch abby_description abby_simulation.launch teleop:=joystick