Robotic arm - Pick & Place

Make sure you are using robo-nd VM or have Ubuntu+ROS installed locally.

One time Gazebo setup step:

Check the version of gazebo installed on your system using a terminal:

$ gazebo --version

To run projects from this repository you need version 7.7.0+ If your gazebo version is not 7.7.0+, perform the update as follows:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
$ wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gazebo7

Once again check if the correct version was installed:

$ gazebo --version

For the rest of this setup, catkin_ws is the name of active ROS Workspace, if your workspace name is different, change the commands accordingly

The project has a demo mode which shows the proper beahavior of the arm.

For demo mode make sure the demo flag is set to "true" in inverse_kinematics.launch file under /RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/launch

In addition, you can also control the spawn location of the target object in the shelf. To do this, modify the spawn_location argument in target_description.launch file under /RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/launch. 0-9 are valid values for spawn_location with 0 being random mode.

You can launch the project by

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ ./safe_spawner.sh

If you are running in demo mode, this is all you need. To run your own Inverse Kinematics code change the demo flag described above to "false" and run your code (once the project has successfully loaded) by:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ rosrun kuka_arm IK_server.py

Once Gazebo and rviz are up and running, make sure you see following in the gazebo world:

- Robot

- Shelf

- Blue cylindrical target in one of the shelves

- Dropbox right next to the robot

If any of these items are missing, report as an issue.

Once all these items are confirmed, open rviz window, hit Next button to continue with the simulation.