Where do I start to create a Hexapod robot? [closed]
I admit that the answer can be a bit subjective, and could create a flame war, so let me do my best to bound the answer space.
I am basically a beginner. Starting a Robot model from scratch is a bit daunting and the process obviously depends on a lot of decisions.
My first goal was to provide joystick control of a hexapod robot that currently functions by serial command. The problem is that each leg servo needs to be separately commanded.
A future goal is to make the robot a bit more autonomous, so using ROS makes sense to me.
My search of tutorials led me to URDF, but the tutorials seemed to stop before I got a working simulator. I have a URDF and a parser.cpp file. There seems to be a lot more needed to run RVIZ and the urdf_tutorial has .vcg files rather than .rviz files so it does not work.
What I think is needed is a top-level "root tutorial starting point" for 3 basic types, roller, flier, multi-legged. From there the types of decisions and the associated packages/tutorials can be linked into a set of top-level descriptions.
As I run through the Wiki and tutorials, I keep running into topics that I have no context for deciding if I care. URDF was the first one that I figured was a good starting point. Obviously, all robots of all types require some sort of "control" node that connects topics to hardware.
As I see it my simplified process is:
- Create URDF model
- Test the model in visual simulation.
- Connect joystick to simulation.
- Connect model to robot.
Does my process make sense?
All I have is a workspace containing two files, what else do I need to create?
