Baxter Motion Planner

Overview

This projects simulates the pick and place ability of Baxter along with obstacle avoidance. The Rviz path planner was used to extract coordinates for the robot to follow a specific path. These points were finally fed to the ik_pick_and_place node to simulate baxter's motion in Gazebo.

Figure 1 - Demo of Baxter moving objects while avoiding obstacles

Author

1. Aman Virmani
2. Umang Rastogi

Dependencies

• ROS Kinetic
• Gazebo
• MoveIt
• Rviz
• Baxter Simulator

Install Dependencies

• This project was developed using ROS Kinetic.
• It is highly recommended that ROS Kinetic is properly installed on your system before the use of this project.
• Follow the instructions on the ROS kinetic install tutorial page to install Full-Desktop Version of ROS Kinetic.
  • If you have the full-desktop version of ROS, you can skip the next 2 steps.
• The full-version would help you install Gazebo as well. If you have ROS Kinetic pre-installed on your machine, use the following link to just install Gazebo on your machine.
• Ensure successful installation by running Gazebo via your terminal window:

gazebo

• Install moveit using the following command:

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-moveit

• Install other packages for move-it Rviz interface:

cd ~/workspace/src
git clone https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit_robots.git
cd ..
catkin_make

• Create your ROS workspace by following instructions on the create ROS workspace tutortial page.
• Follow the Rethink Robotics link to setup the Baxter simulator.

Waypoints Extraction

• The coordinates for Baxter to pick'n'place objects while avoiding obstacles were extracted using Rviz Path Planning.
• A demo of the same can be seen below.

Figure 2 - Demo of extracting waypoints for Baxter to avoid obstacles

Build

Switch to your src sub-directory of your ROS workspace to clone this repository.

<ROS Workspace>/src

• Run the following commands to clone and build this project:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/urastogi885/Supermarket-Cleaning-Robot
cd ../
catkin_make

Run

Now, we use launch file to run. In a new terminal, type:

cd catkin_ws
source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch baxter-motion-planning baxter.launch