BAD

About

BAD (BarrettHand AUTh Driver) is a basic driver, written in C++, that provides the necessary functionalities in order to control the robotic hand BarrettHand under Linux. This driver does not provide real time capabilites yet. BAD has been developed during a diploma thesis in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) and is open source software.

Note that the driver implements a BHand having the Fingertip Torque Sensor option, but not the tactile sensors.

Dependencies

• Required:
• PCAN Linux Driver (for Peak-Systems hardware)
• PCAN-Basic API
• Optional
  • Xenomai

Installing Dependencies on Ubuntu Linux 12.04

1. Installing PCAN Linux Driver

Download from here the latest version of the driver.

$ sudo apt-get install libpopt-dev g++	#Install libpopt-dev, g++
$ tar -xzf peak-linux-driver-7.XX.tar.gz	#Unpack driver
$ cd peak-linux-driver-7.XX
$ make clean
$ make NET=NO RT=NO_RT PCC=NO ISA=NO DNG=NO
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe pcan

If everything is installed you with: $ cat /proc/pcan You will se something like that:

*------------ PEAK-Systems CAN interfaces (http://www.peak-system.com)-------
*-------------------------- Release_20110912_n (7.4.0) ----------------------
*---------------- [mod] [isa] [pci] [dng] [par] [usb] [pcc] -----------------
*--------------------- 1 interfaces @ major 250 found -----------------------
*n -type- ndev --base-- irq --btr- --read-- --write- --irqs-- -errors- status
0    pci -NA- fa010000 018 0x001c 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 0x0000

2. Installing PCAN-Basic APIi

You can download PCAN-basic from Peak-Systems website.

Then you may install PCAN-Basic:

cd pcanbasic
make
sudo make install

Compiling and using BAD

Compile the source code:

make all

This will create two executables: bad and bad_logger. With bad running the HighLevelBAD.h functions and bad_logger running two threads, one for a application function and one for the BAD::logger() function, which record data. Bear in mind that you must create a directory with the name 'log_files' in order the files to be stored.

The user can extend the BAD API by adding functions in HighLevelBAD.h (implementations in HighLevelBAD.cpp) and then by call them in main() in bad.cpp. You can consult the already existing code of the API to learn how to use the functions.

Changelist

• 0.4 - Additional changes to higher level.
• Adding more functionality in Higher BAD Level, with higher level functions for grasping and signal filtering.
• Bug fixes
• Additional executable that use 2 threads, 1 for the application and 1 for logging data to file.
• 0.3 - Adding the kinematics of the robot
• 0.2 - Changing the layered structure of the program.
• The first tier (CANbus.cpp) is now independent from upper levels.
• 0.1 - initial release