Update

This morning I broke up Abby’s CAD files and made a new SimMechanics file for Greg to play with in Gazebo. While I was at it, I updated the inverter and the positions of all of the electronics I moved on Monday. I didn’t draw new holes in the bottom plate, and all the locations are approximate, but it should be good enough.

I upgraded my Mac Mini to ROS Fuerte because I think it’s best that I have a consistent development environment across all my computers. It’s still running Ubuntu Lucid, but that shouldn’t be an issue. I noticed that Bill has made some changes in the github repository for the cwru-ros-pkg, notably for fuerte compatibility. I merged his changes into mine (it looks like we made more or less the same changes for fuerte). I’m going to keep doing my work on my own fork just so I don’t have to worry about breaking anyone’s code.

I spent some time reading up on what messages ROS Industrial is sending and receiving. The important messages, from what I can tell are /joint_states and /tf. There is a node /rob_st_pub that listens to /joint_states and publishes on /tf. The relay node that communicates with the ABB arm would need to publish to /joint_states and /rob_st_pub (assuming it’s properly configured for the arm) should publish the transforms for rviz/gazebo/ROS as appropriate. I still haven’t picked through how to send commands to the arm.

Right now, I’m trying to set up a simple listener in Python to get data from the IRC5 using RRI. I think I’m close, but right now I’m getting an ERR_COMM_INIT on the IRC5. Time to call it a night.