A Systematic Approach to Learning Robot Programming with ROS

CHAPTER 14

Arm Control with Baxter Simulator

CONTENTS

14.1 Running Baxter simulator

14.2 Baxter joints and topics

14.3 Baxter’s grippers

14.4 Head pan control

14.5 Commanding Baxter joints

14.6 Using ROS joint trajectory controller

14.7 Joint-space record and playback nodes

14.8 Baxter kinematics

14.9 Baxter Cartesian moves

14.10 Wrap-Up

INTRODUCTION

In the context of learning about control of robot arms, the Baxter robot simulator, which runs in Gazebo, is helpful. The Baxter simulator, composed by the manufacturer ReThink Robotics, is a reasonably faithful model of the robot. The simulator and the physical robot have identical ROS interfaces, so programs developed under simulation can be ported quickly to the corresponding physical robot. ...