Robotic Arm - Pick & Place Project

This is my turn-in code as partial fulfillment of Udacity's Robotics Nanodegree. I wrote code to calculate the joint angles of six degree-of-freedom Kuka Kr210 serial manipulator given the position an orientation of its end effector in 3-D space. This code is used by the robot arm in a simulator to pick cylinders in a shelf and drop it in a bin. The simulation is implemented in a ROS environment with Gazebo and Rviz.

Notes

WRITEUP

Jupyter notebooks:

• Exposition of the inverse kinematics thought process
• Optimization of the inverse kinematics process
• Derivation of the transforms used in the inverse kinematics process
• Exposition of Euler angles and how to get the last three angles

Dependencies and Setup

• Install ROS on a computer with Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial

• Clone Udacity's original repository

• Replace IK_server.py in ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts with the following script below:

• IK SERVER PYTHON SCRIPT

• Follow the instructions as indicated in the README of the original repository

Usage

• Make sure the demo flag is set to "false" in inverse_kinematics.launch file under /RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/launch

• Launch the project

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ ./safe_spawner.sh  

• On a separate terminal, run the inverse kinematics script

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Kinematics-Project/kuka_arm/scripts
$ rosrun kuka_arm IK_server.py