PhantomX Pincher Arm ROS Packages

These are packages for controlling the PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm Mark II. They were tested on ROS Melodic and ROS Noetic distributions.

The main motivation for creating this repository was to provide an alternative to the turtlebot_arm packages which lack maintenance and have some issues with the Pincher arm. In particular, support for Pincher arm in turtlebot_arm packages, requires building a special version of arbotix_ros packages. In contrast, pincher_arm packages work with the official version of arbotix_ros released in ROS.

Parts of this code were inspired by these Pull Requests:
turtlebot/turtlebot_arm#24
vanadiumlabs/arbotix_ros#28

Building

You can build these packages using catkin like any other ROS package. All of the dependencies can be installed using the rosdep tool.

Usage

Start the arm driver:

roslaunch pincher_arm_bringup arm.launch

You might need to change the port parameter in the pincher_arm_bringup/config/arm.yaml file.

Once you have the driver up and running, you can start MoveIt!:

roslaunch pincher_arm_moveit_config pincher_arm_moveit.launch sim:=false

and perform some path planning operations in RViz.

To run pick and place demo, ensure you have MoveIt! running and type:

rosrun pincher_arm_moveit_demos pick_place