created by @Tongyuang, inspired by the kinova-ros repo for the engine, credit to @Queenie Qiu and Prof. @John Raiti for their help from TECHIN 514 course at Global Innovation Exchange(GIX), UW. More about GIX

We are using the KINOVA gen3 arm for this project to grab some cubes and stack them up one by one.

To be specific, three cubes with size of $5cm$ are placed on given positions, the arm will pick up these cubes one by one, and put the cubes to the target position in a stack.

The initial positions of the cubes and the target position is pre-defined, and the process is an open-loop control, which means it's not aware of where the cubes are actually, it just follow the commands to reach specific points step by step.

2.1 Robot Arm KINOVA gen3 arm with dof = 6, theoretically, the dof for gen3 should be 7 and gen3_lite should be 6, but our arm has dof=6 instead. The gripper we use is from ROBOTIQ 2F-85.

2.2 Environment Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS + ROS noetic + Python 3.x

• Make sure you have already have the kortex environment setup properly.

$ sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
$ sudo python3 -m pip install conan
$ conan config set general.revisions_enabled=1
$ conan profile new default --detect > /dev/null
$ conan profile update settings.compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11 default
$ cd catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/Kinovarobotics/ros_kortex.git
$ cd ../
$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -y

After you have all the dependencies installed, build and source the worksapce:

$ catkin_make
$ source devel/setup.bash

• After that, launch a kortex_driver in the terminal:

$ roslaunch kortex_driver kortex_driver.launch arm:=gen3 dof:=6
gripper:=robotiq_2f_85 ip_address:= <robot ip address>

In my case, the robot ip is 10.155.234.34.

• Implement the controller by

# set the namespace
$ export ROS_NAMESPACE="/my_gen3/"
# remember to install all the required libraries
$ python kinova_controller.py

The pick-and-place process can be customized by modifing the parameters in the kinova_pickupsetting.jsonfile. One can customize the positions of the cubes and the target there.

demo video here