Micro Parallel

Installation

Required

The simulations are done using the simulation framework SOFA. Binaries of SOFA with the required and optional plugins are available here. If you compile SOFA, checkout the following source code:

• SOFA on branch master
• SofaPython3 plugin for SOFA on branch master
• BeamAdapter plugin on branch master
• SoftRobots plugin on branch master
• STLIB plugin on branch master

Optional

• SoftRobots.Inverse plugin for SOFA to solve the inverse kinematics of the robot
• ROS2 to send commands to the robot from an external program (last tested with ROS2 Humble)

How to

1. Run the simulation. In your terminal:

~$ cd TIRREX.MicroParallel
~/TIRREX.MicroParallel$ runSofa scene.py
~/TIRREX.MicroParallel$ runSofa sceneInverseKinematics.py  # for inverse resolution

2. To use ROS2, first source it in your terminal. For instance:

~/TIRREX.MicroParallel$ source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

To enable ROS, uncomment the following line in file scene.py:

# Uncomment these lines to enable ROS communication
from controller import SofaROSInterface
rootnode.addObject(SofaROSInterface(robot.node))

Features

Parameters

The geometric and mechanical parameters of the robot can be changed from the file params.py.

ROS

Two topics are created on the node SOFASimulation:

• the topic /TIRREX/microparallel/simulationData, on which the actual dofs values are being published at each time step of the simulation
• and the topic /TIRREX/microparallel/interfaceData, on which the simulation is subscribing and looking for commands

The simulation expects the following commands (see file controller.py):

# A list of 4 elements
[ q0, # leg0 displacement in mm
  q1, # leg1 displacement in mm
  q2, # leg2 displacement in mm
  q3, # leg3 displacement in mm
]

Authors

Eulalie Coevoet & Mohamed Chakroune