Robotic Arm

The following example focuses on the hierarchies of automatas. The basic idea is to use predeveloped states to develop more complex behaviours. The example contains the following states -

• DrawI (Simple State with Letter I)
• DrawLove (Complex State with Letters L,O,V,E)
• DrawJdeRobot (Complex State with Letters J,D,E,R,O,B,O,T) Hence we need low level states with letters from A to Z to generate any behavior which contains letters. The low level states contains the Robotic Arm code to drive the ARM to write letters. For example, State drawA would contain robot code to draw letter A. Hence using hierarchies of these states we can develop complex states, i.e complex words/sentences. With a library of all 26 letters, we can Import the states(words) and construct any word/sentences.

Steps to run the example

Dependencies

• OpenCV
• VisualStates
• We assume you have created a ROS Workspace, cloned the latest release of VisualStates, compiled and sourced the workspace.

ROS Package Generation

1. Copy the robot_arm folder as a ROS package to your workspace. In our case we name it ‘catkin_ws’

   cd catkin_ws
   cd src
   cp -r <path_to_visualstates_examples>/robot_arm/* .
   cd ..
   

2. Generate the ROS Package of the behavior using the visualstates.

   rosrun visualstates main.py <path_to_ros_workspace>/src/robot_arm/robot_arm.xml
   

3. Generate ROS package using Actions -> Generate Python menu.
4. Recompile the ROS Workspace and you would find a new package robot_arm in the package list. After compiling, source the workspace again.

   catkin_make
   source devel/setup.bash
   

5. Start roscore and run the generated ROS Node with Visualization Flag as True.

   roscore
   rosrun robot_arm robot_arm.py --displaygui=true