Reach Alpha 5 ROS 2 Driver :mechanical_arm:

The Alpha 5 driver is a collection of ROS 2 packages designed to support ROS 2 integration with the Reach Alpha 5 manipulator.

:warning: Disclaimer :warning:

This is an independent project, and is not affiliated with or maintained by Reach Robotics. Please refer to the Reach Robotics SDK for all official software.

Main features

The main features of the Alpha 5 driver are:

• Integration of the Reach System Serial Protocol for hardware communication
• ros2_control integration for manipulator position, velocity, and joint trajectory control
• Simulation support using Gazebo Garden
• Visualization support using RViz2
• Integration with MoveIt2 for motion planning

Installation

The Alpha 5 driver is currently supported on Linux, and is available for the ROS distributions Humble and Rolling. To install the Alpha 5 driver, first clone this project to the src directory of your ROS workspace, replacing $ROS_DISTRO with the desired ROS distribution or main for Rolling:

git clone -b $ROS_DISTRO git@github.com:evan-palmer/alpha.git

After cloning the project, install the ROS dependencies using rosdep, again, replacing $ROS_DISTRO with the desired ROS distribution:

rosdep update && \
rosdep install -y --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO

Quick start

A ROS 2 launch file has been provided to start the Alpha 5 driver. To launch the driver using default arguments, run

ros2 launch alpha_bringup alpha.launch.py

A full description of the launch arguments and their respective default values can be obtained by running the following command:

ros2 launch alpha_bringup alpha.launch.py --show-args

Getting help

If you have questions regarding usage of the Alpha 5 driver or regarding contributing to this project, please ask a question on our Discussions board!

License

Any proprietary documents or software owned by Reach Robotics and used within this project are made available with official permission from Reach Robotics and have been documented accordingly. All other software is is released under the MIT license.