Robotics Project

The project consists of the implementation of a system to recognise the position of blocks placed on a table, and move them using an anthropomorphic arm manipulator.

Here a video of our robot working:

Robotics_Project.mp4

If you are interested in how we developed the project, have a look at the report.

How to install

This package requires to be inside the same ROS workspace as the project of Locosim. Once Locosim is installed and this repo has been cloned, you may have to change the 5th line in the Makefile so that the path to the workspace matches. By default, we set

WORKSPACE_PATH=~/ros_ws

Disclaimer: The Locosim repository has been updated since we installed it. We developed the project based on this version (commit 1bb4e0702ee3a260c74d750cfad8f09de96a6087).

ROS Nodes

We have three ROS nodes:

• client : This node interacts with the UR5 and the other modules
• movement_handler : This node provides a service that computes the movements that the UR5 should do
• vision : This node provides a service that detects the blocks' pose on the table and returns their informations to the client module

Building

Before starting to build the project, you need to include the Eigen submodule in the git repo

git submodule update --init --recursive

To build the project simply run the Makefile (do not worry about sourcing the project since we already integrated this step inside the Makefile).

make

Run this command to install all the dependencies needed by the vision module

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

The following steps are sequential and need to be executed in different terminals.

Run the robot

In order to run the simulation of the robot, execute

make run-robot

Running the robot closes every instance of rosmaster and opens a new one, so it is not necessary to run the roscore in a seperate terminal.

Start the Movement Handler module

Execute

make run-movement

This starts a module on the current console, given that the following command has to be executed in a different one.

Start the Vision module

When the robot has completed his homing procedure and the blocks are spawned on the table, execute

make run-vision

This starts the vision module on the current console.

Execute the Client module

Execute

make run-client

If every module is started correctly, the robot will begin to move when the vision module has computed the blocks' positions and the movement module has returned the path that the robot has to follow.

Documentation

To generate Doxygen documentation, you need to have Doxygen installed on your computer. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can do so with:

sudo apt install -y doxygen

Then run this command to generate the documentation of the project

make documentation

You will have to launch the html file in /docs/html/index.html to explore the documentation of the project.