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I can't speak to the KDL portion of the question, but as for the rest of arm navigation I think that things should function correctly even with a very simple arm. There is no requirement of having an IK solver at all - you'll lose out to some extent in terms of interactivity, and you won't be able to pass pose goals into the planners, but joint space goals should function correctly. All of the tools already contain interaction modes where you can set joint goals directly - just stick to these modes and I expect that you'll get plans returned.

As for the rest of it, it's pretty straight-forward to implement a new IK plugin - just start with the existing KDL plugin as a base, make a copy, assign it a new class name, and make whatever changes you want to try. Then just declare the plugin in the kinematics_plugin.xml file either in your own package or in a code checkout of arm_kinematics_constraint_aware (if doing it in your own package make sure there's a direct dependency on kinematics_base in the manifest.xml). Then change over your autogenerated launch files to point at the new plugin and you should be able to try things out using the tools.

The larger issue is that it may be difficult to pick things up with such a simple arm. If you have relatively few DOF in your arm it generally makes sense to compensate for that in terms of degrees of freedom of the base to allow you to reach more positions - if you have a holonomic base you can then get 5 DOF in terms of end effector position. Our tools don't really extend to utilizing this kind of base movement to expand the reachability of a lower DOF manipulator, and I imagine this will lessen the usefulness of arm navigation for your low DOF arm.