Quick Recap

For the past few days I have been figuring out the ROS environment. I decided to use ROS as the primary ecosystem for the robot in order to take advantage of MoveIt and RViz. Before, the robot ran off a custom controller, inverse kinematics model, and a basic command line based interface as a way to enter the desired cartesian coordinates. This worked perfectly for testing purposes and many parts of the code will be reused such as the joint interpolated motion functions, however with MoveIt it will be a much better visual way of controlling the robot poses and position. Along with this, ROS is very reusable and modular and concepts can be applied to future robotics projects.

Planning

With this I plan to write an Arduino program using the rosserial library that subscribes to the MoveIt topic (/joint_space). This will let the Arduino know the joint angles and pass them to the joint interpolated motion program that I previously wrote (can be found in the GitHub repo) - a seamless integration. This portion is not yet written, however it will be in the coming days. Here is a screen cap of some test motions in RViz.