RDS Powerhouse Software

Authors: Cole Abbott, Heinrich Asbury, Jared Berry, Evan Bulatek, and Benji Sobeloff-Gittes

This project was associated with MECH_ENG 472: Robot Design Studio at Northwestern University.

This repository contains packages for interfacing with our electronics/hardware, controlling the finger, and running a Drake simulation with ROS2. Simulation documentation, demos, and architecture description can be found in the finger_sim package.

Generative AI was used for ROS2 node skeletons and Drake API access, with manual adjustments being made for our specific needs.

Features

• A pure C++ library containing most of the control stack allows us to use the same exact controllers in simulation and hardware. This has been very useful for testing.
• A Drake + ROS2 simulation of the Powerhouse finger, with fully simulated contacts and linkage, and Meshcat visualization.
• Fully simulated tendons that allow motor commands to actuate the finger.
• Joint torque + joint position controllers.
• GUIs to visualize and control the finger with each controller.
• An Onshape -> URDF pipeline using Blender.
  • We chose to use URDF for the robot description, since that is how it is done in public Drake code, as well as internal references.

Packages

• core - A regular C++ package for interfacing with hardware and controlling the finger.
• finger_description - A ROS2 C++ package for visualizing the finger in rviz2.
• finger_sim - A ROS2 C++ package for running simulations of the finger.
• fingerlib - A pure C++ library for housing controller code that can be used for both firmware and sim.
• finger_control - A ROS2 C++ package for finger controllers, wrapping controller implementations in fingerlib.

Simulation Build Instructions

1. Set up your computer for Ubuntu 24.04, ROS2 Kilted, etc.
   • Instructions
2. Install Drake and drake_ros
   • Instructions
3. Use the following command to build the drake_ros ROS2 workspace.

   bash --norc --noprofile << 'EOF'
   source /opt/ros/kilted/setup.bash
   export CC=gcc-13
   export CXX=g++-13
   colcon build --packages-select drake_ros \
   --cmake-args \
       -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/drake \
       -Dpybind11_DIR=/opt/drake/lib/cmake/pybind11 \
       -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-13 \
       -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-13 \
       -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF

4. Clone this git repository into the src/ repository of a new ROS2 colcon workspace, and build it.
5. Follow the instructions in the README in finger_sim to run the simulation.

Firmware Build Instructions

• To build without ROS2 (no visualization/simulator) use platform.io.

References

• drake_ros