Ada (or Assistive Dextrous Arm) is a package for controlling the Mico robot arm through the Personal Robotics pipeline. It is a high-level package, pulling from ROS, OpenRAVE, and other lower-level parts of the system. At the highest level, it provides scripts for controlling the robot, planning trajectories, finding inverse kinematics solutions, and more.

The following rosinstall can be used to get the minimum dependencies required to use AdaPy in simulation:

First, be sure to clone https://github.com/HARPLab/harplab-rosinstalls.git into somewhere like ~/harplab-rosinstalls. If it's already there, make sure it's up to date. Then, run

$ wstool merge ~/harplab-rosinstalls/ada-sim.rosinstall 

If you plan to connect to the real robot, then you will need a larger set of dependencies:

$ wstool merge ~/harplab-rosinstalls/ada.rosinstall

Be sure you've run all the steps at https://github.com/HARPLab/harpdocs/blob/master/software_machine_setup.md in order to set up your machine with the required packages to compile this.

Create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-jaco.rules with the content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor} =="22cd", MODE="0666", GROUP="pr", SYMLINK+="mico"

You use ada in your script by simply calling the initialize function:

env, robot = adapy.initialize()

To connect to the robot, run the launch script:

roslaunch ada_launch default.launch

You may have to re-launch several times before the robot will connect. This will also start up all the controllers.

Now, run the test script:

rosrun adapy test.py

This will open up a python console that you can use to send commands to the robot. See prpy for more info.