WidowX 250 (Robotic Arm)
In this tutorial, we will show you how to integrate and remotely control the WidowX 250 robotic arm.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to integrate and remotely control the WidowX 250 robotic arm.
Mounting and wiring the arm
The mounting of the arm is particularly easy. If you have bought the arm with the modified support plate designed for our robot, you can use screws and nuts to connect the arm to the rover's mounting plate.
If you have the original support plate, you can get the model for 3D printing here (addons section):
page3D-printed partsUse the modified Battery <-> MEB cable, included in the set, to connect the battery to the power socket located on the arm.
Last but not least, connect the arm's U2D2 driver to the rover's computer through the miniUSB socket located on the mounting plate.
Integrating the arm with the system
There is a couple of files that will need to be modified on the Rover's system. We will show you how to do this using nano
- a command line text editor, but if you have your own preferable method of editing files, feel free to use it.
We need to make sure the U2D2 device is available at a fixed path on rover's system. To do this, you can add a rule to udev
. Open a new .rules
file with nano
:
and paste the following rule:
To save the file, type Ctrl+O and Enter to confirm. Type Ctrl+X to exit nano
.
For the rule to take effect, reboot the system or just type:
The device should now be available under /dev/ttyDXL
path. You can check it by typing:
To integrate the arm, you will need to build some additional ROS packages. Start by creating a local catkin workspace, if you don't have one yet:
The package sources for the arm are available on Github at the interbotix_ros_arms repository. Clone the repository to your source space:
On the rover, you will only need the driver node for the arm (interbotix_sdk
package) and the URDF description (interbotix_descriptions
package). To speed up the building process, remove the unwanted packages:
Now, use rosdep
to install any dependent packages:
and build the workspace:
Once the packages have been built, you can edit the environmental setup file to point to your result space. Open the file in nano
:
Comment out the first line by adding #
sign and add the source command for your workspace. The first 2 lines should look essentially like this:
Now, to add the arm's driver to the rover's launch file, open the robot.launch
file:
and paste these lines somewhere between the <launch>
tags:
You can learn more about the driver's parameters and functionalities at the interbotix_sdk README page.
You can also edit the robot's URDF file to connect the arm's base link to the rover's model. To do this, open the robot.urdf.xacro
file:
and paste these lines somewhere between the <robot>
tags:
To learn more about what the files under /etc/ros
are used for and how do they correlate with each other, visit the Adding additional functionality to the rover section on ROS Development guide:
That's it! On the next boot, the arm driver node will start together with all the other nodes. You can manually restart the running nodes, by typing:
Controlling the arm
Now that you have the driver running, you should see the new ROS topics and services under the /wx250
namespace. For a full description of the ROS API, visit the interbotix_sdk README page. You can test some of the features with the rostopic
and rosservice
command-line tools:
Retrieve the information about the arm:
Publish position command to the elbow joint:
Turn off the torque on all joints:
The interbotix_ros_arms repository contains some packages that will let you control the arm in different ways. To use them on your computer, you will need to have ROS installed:
pageInstall ROS on your computerand properly configured to communicate with the nodes running on the rover. For this, you can visit Connecting other computer to ROS network section of the ROS Development tutorial:
pageROS DevelopmentFirst, install some prerequisites:
The modern_robotics
python package is required to run the joystick control example.
and create a catkin workspace:
Clone the interbotix_ros_arms
and leo_description
repositories into the source space:
Install dependencies using the rosdep
tool:
and build the workspace:
Now, source
the devel space to make the new packages visible in your shell environment:
You will have to do this at every terminal session you want to use the packages on, so it is convenient to add this line to the ~/.bashrc
file.
Visualizing the model
Open RViz by typing
rviz
in the terminal.Choose
base_link
as the Fixed Frame.On the Displays panel click on Add and choose RobotModel.
For the Robot Description parameter, choose
robot_description
.Add another RobotModel display, but for the Robot Description parameter choose
wx250/robot_description
.
The effect should look similar to this:
Planning the trajectory with MoveIt
MoveIt motion planning framework will allow us to plan and execute a collision-free trajectory to the destination pose of the end-effector. To use it, first make sure you have the use_moveit
parameter for the arm driver set to true
:
On your computer, type:
The MoveIt GUI should appear:
On the MotionPlanning panel, click on the Planning tab, choose interbotix_arm
for the Planning Group and <current>
for the Start State.
There are some predefined poses which you can choose for the Goal State, such as home
, sleep
or upright
. To set the pose manually, navigate to the DIsplays panel -> MotionPlanning - > Planning Request and check Query Goal State
. You should now be able to manually set the end-effector pose for the goal state.
When the goal state is set, click on the Plan button to plan the trajectory (the simulated trajectory visualization should appear) and Execute to send the trajectory to the driver.
If you want to use the MoveIt capabilities in a Python script or a C++ program, please look at the interbotix_moveit_interface example.
Using joystick to control the arm
The interbotix_joy_control
example package provides the capability to control the movement of the arm (utilizing inverse kinematics) with a PS3, PS4 or an Xbox 360 joystick.
To use the package with the arm connected to your rover:
Change the parameters for the driver node. The joy control node uses the
pwm
mode for the gripper and is more suited to work with the Time-Based-Profile. Here are the settings that work well:/etc/ros/robot.launchConnect the joystick to your computer. You can find the instructions on the package's README file.
Start the
joy_control.launch
file:Change
controller
to eitherps3
,ps4
orxbox360
depending on the joystick you have connected.
Using the Python API
Aside from the driver, the interbotix_sdk
package also provides a Python API for manipulating the arm. It is designed to mainly work with the position
mode for the arm, pwm
mode for the gripper and the Time-Based-Profile. For a start, you can set the same parameters for the driver as in the previous example.
There are some example scripts that demonstrate the use of the API at the interbotix_examples/python_demos
directory.
The bartender.py
demo performs some pick, pour and place operations. To run it, first open the file in a text editor and search for this line:
Change wx250s
to wx250
and then type on the terminal:
Make sure that you are not running any other script that takes control of the arm simultaneously (e.g. the joy control node).
If everything went right, you should see the arm in action.
You can check the other files in the directory for more examples. To view the available functions in the API and their documentation, take a look at the robot_manipulation.py file.
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