README.md

Overview

ROS 2 workspace for controlling AgileX Piper arms from ROS 2 or DLS controllers.

The repository is based on AgileX's new driver stack:

• pyAgxArm for the Python CAN driver
• agx_arm_ros for the official ROS 2 control, message, description, and MoveIt packages

The local ROS package named piper_sdk is kept as a thin wrapper around pyAgxArm, so the SDK is installed by colcon build without using pip install --break-system-packages.

Repository Contents

This workspace contains the following packages:

• piper_sdk: ROS 2 wrapper around the pyAgxArm git submodule, automatically installed by colcon build
• agx_arm_ros: Official AgileX ROS 2 packages for control, messages, description, and MoveIt
• dls2_interface: Standard messages definition for DLS2
• dls2_piper_bridge: DLS2 hardware-abstraction-layer using the pyAgxArm API

Prerequisites

• Install ROS 2 Jazzy and initialize rosdep.

• Clone this repository including submodules

  git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:iit-DLSLab/piper-ros2-dls.git
  cd piper-ros2-dls
  

• Source ROS 2 and install rosdep dependencies

  source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash
  rosdep install -y --ignore-src --from-paths ros2_ws/src
  

• Install any system dependencies required by the official AgileX packages

  sudo apt install can-utils ethtool
  

• Build and source the ROS 2 workspace

  cd ros2_ws
  colcon build
  source install/setup.bash
  

Usage

Before using the arm, CAN-bus communication must be manually enabled. Assuming the current folder is ros2_ws, this can be done with

bash ./src/agx_arm_ros/scripts/can_activate.sh

DLS 2 bridge

The DLS 2 bridge is independent of the official agx_arm_ros packages. To run it after building and sourcing the workspace use

ros2 run dls2_piper_bridge piper_hal

The DLS2 bridge accepts the CAN interface as a ROS parameter:

ros2 run dls2_piper_bridge piper_hal --ros-args -p can_port:=can0

ROS 2 MoveIt

A convenient launch file is provided in agx_arm_ctrl to run the arm control node together with the MoveIt framework

ros2 launch agx_arm_ctrl start_single_agx_arm_moveit.launch.py arm_type:=piper_l effector_type:=agx_gripper follow:=true

Maintainer

This repository is maintained by Giulio Turrisi and Antonio Langella.