This project contains a ROS driver for the Variense FSE103 force sensor.
This package depends on the libusb library and requires its developer version installed:
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
Currently the package can be installed by cloning this github repository into your catkin workspace and building the package:
cd ~/catkin_ws/src
mkdir variense && cd variense
git clone https://github.com/h-khalili/fse103_ros_driver.git variense_fse103
cd ~/catkin_ws && catkin_make
In order to send and receive data over USB, the user must have read and write access to the USB device. A simple method to achieve this is to gain root access. Don't forget to source your workspace setup file:
sudo su
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
Alternatively, one could modify udev rules to avoid having to do this every time:
cd /etc/udev/rules.d
sudo su
touch fse103.rules
echo 'SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="16d0", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c21", MODE:="0660", GROUP:="plugdev"' > fse103.rules
udevadm control --reload-rules && udevadm trigger
Instead of granting permission to a group (plugdev in this case), the owner can be set directly by replacing GROUP:="plugdev" with OWNER:="<user>".
The driver can be run from the command line as shown below where the driver will attempt to connect to the first FSE103 sensor it finds :
rosrun variense_fse103 fse103_node
By passing serial number of the sensor as a parameter, the driver can be run for that specific sensor. Additional optional parameters can also be passed:
rosrun variense_fse103 fse103_node _serial_number:="103EAA8876" _filter_bandwidth:="6"
A full list of parameters is provided in the Parameters section. With multiple parameters, a more elegant way is to use a launch file to run the driver.
The launch file variense_fse103/launch/force_sensors.launch shows an example of how to run multiple drivers (or a single driver) for different force sensors from a launch file. The launch file can be run normally:
roslaunch variense_fse103 force_sensors.launch
In order to find all the Variense FSE103 sensors connected to the system, and their corresponding serial numbers, you can run the following node:
rosrun variense_fse103 list_sensors
or optionally adding -v for a detailed display of the sensors.
Remember that this requires USB access permission!
This section includes a list of all the parameters that can be used to configure the force sensor driver. These can either be passed using the command line as:
_<par_name>:=<par_value>
or using the launch file as:
<param name="<par_name>" value=<par_value> />
where <par_name> and <par_value> are the name and value of the parameter.
serial_number(Default:"") The serial number of the specified force sensor.rate(Default:"200") The publishing rate of the sensor data in Hz. Note that the maximum sampling frequency of the sensor is just over 210Hz.filter_bandwidth(Default:"0") The cut-off frequency of the optional lowpass 2nd order Butterworth filter. A value of 0 indicates no filtering. The maximum frequency is half the sampling rate (Nyquist theorem).sensor_id(Default:"") The sensor id that determines the name of the publishing topic (explained in the next section). This can be any string.init_on_start(Default:"true") This parameter determines whether the force sensor is sent an initialisation command when the node starts. The initialisation resets the current offset to zero.
By default the force sensor measurements are published to:
/force_sensor(geometry_msgs/Vector3Stamped)
but with a non-empty sensor_id parameter, the topic name becomes:
/force_sensor_<sensor_id>
where <sensor_id> is the parameter value.
Currently, the only available service is sensor initialisation (zeroing the offset). For a node with the default name /force_sensor_node, the service can be called as follows:
rosservice call /force_sensor_node/initialise
The name of the node can be changed through the command line:
rosrun variense_fse103 fse103_node __name:="<node_name>"
and in the launch file:
<node name="<node_name>" pkg="variense_fse103" type="fse103_node">
... </node>
where <node_name> is the specified node name.
- libusb - C library that provides generic access to USB devices
- IIR1 -- Realtime C++ filter library by Bernd Porr
- Hassan H. Khalili - h-khalili
This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.
The source code of the sensor driver has been developed as header-only libraries which are independent of ROS. The files in the include/variense_fse103 can be reused with generic C++ code. A test program is also included in the test folder.