Ada (or Assistive Dextrous Arm) is a package for controlling the Mico robot arm through the Personal Robotics pipeline. It is a high-level package, pulling from ROS, OpenRAVE, and other lower-level parts of the system. At the highest level, it provides scripts for controlling the robot, planning trajectories, finding inverse kinematics solutions, and more.
The following rosinstall can be used to get the minimum dependencies required to use AdaPy in simulation:
$ wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/personalrobotics/pr-rosinstalls/master/ada-sim.rosinstall
If you plan to connect to the real robot, then you will need a larger set of dependencies:
$ wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/personalrobotics/pr-rosinstalls/master/ada.rosinstall
Create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/45-jaco.rules
with the content:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor} =="22cd", MODE="0666", GROUP="pr", SYMLINK+="mico"
A note on USB 3.0: the mico arm does not work with USB 3.0 ports. If your computer has no USB 2.0 ports, you will need to disable xHCI in your BIOS.
You use ada in your script by simply calling the initialize
function:
env, robot = adapy.initialize()
To connect to the robot, run the launch script:
roslaunch ada_launch default.launch
You may have to re-launch several times before the robot will connect. This will also start up all the controllers.
Now, run the test script:
rosrun adapy test.py
This will open up a python console that you can use to send commands to the robot. See prpy
for more info.