Is this still a valid workcell?

[beniroquai]

Hey @LuckierDodge et al, after reading your manuscript I'm deeply impressed by the work you put into this and even more impressed by the fact that I can find all the code to reproduce it! Great! However, I'm having trouble finding the first step into the WEI universe. I want to control an OT2 + microscope + robot arm and in the best case also simulate it. Is RViz still an option? Unfortunately, Omniverse is not an option on my computer.

Thanks a lot for your help!

[LuckierDodge]

Hey @beniroquai, thank you for reaching out, and for the kind words!

• Since the time this workcell was developed, there's been a lot of changes to WEI.
• We've taken a step away from using ROS, instead primarily writing REST modules for each instrument. This was largely driven by the desire to reduce boilerplate and avoid some network discovery issues we were running into, especially for instruments that don't benefit from the ROS ecosystem, but we did lose some of the simulation capabilities that ROS provides in the process.
• That being said, we do still have the code to support ROS modules in WEI, it just isn't being actively maintained at present. It shouldn't be too difficult to revive that functionality, RVIZ included, and I'd be happy to help support that for an interested collaborator.
• In terms of "first steps into the WEI universe", we've been working on providing comprehensive docs here, though they're still a bit of a work-in-progress. We've also created a WEI Template Workcell to help new users bootstrap a Workcell of their own.
• Some other links that might be of interest (these repos are more or less what the ot2_workcell has evolved into):
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/wei
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/ot2_module
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/ot2_module_ros
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/rpl_workcell
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/pf400_module
  • https://github.com/AD-SDL/pf400_module_ros

I'd be happy to answer any other questions you have!

[beniroquai]

Hey @LuckierDodge Thanks a lot for your quick reply. I was able to run the camera demo already. My question was indeed what'S the latest "way" to simulate the workflow as there are at least two versions (e.g. Omniverse, RVIZ). HTTP would be great as I'm not really familiar with ROS and the way of installing it is..well..complicated ;-)

As for the OT2 inside WEI, could I use a locally running opentrons framework (forgot if the fastapi is exposed) for simulation purposes?