Aq Bars

This is a ROS package that uses a Novint Falcon to teleoperate a modified LynxMotion arm. The arm is equiped with tactile bump switches which are rendered as walls on the Falcon. There is also a simulated version of the arm available in this package.

This package is for the botboarduino version of a LynxMotion ALD5 Arm. It includes arduino code with drastically improved perfomance compared to the LynxMotion example code.

This package has been tested on Ubuntu 16.04 using ROS-kinetic

The word Aq Bars refers to a mythical creature which is half snow leopard, half falcon.

Setup and install

You will first need to install libNiFalcon, following the directions here: https://github.com/libnifalcon/libnifalcon In addition to the directions on their repo I had to add the following to my bashrc:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/lib/

This is a ROS package. To use it you will need to install ROS-kinetic (http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic). You will then need a catkin workspace. If you already have one you can skip this step other wise run:

mkdir aqbar_ws/src
cd aqbar_ws
catkin_make

THEN clone this repository into aqbar_ws/src

cd aqbar_ws/src 
git clone https://github.com/sgillen/aqbar

You then need to copy the udev rules

sudo cp udev_rules/99-udev-novint.rules /etc/udev/rules.d*

If you want to use the simualted arm, you will also need to clone this package: https://github.com/ros-planning/panda_moveit_config into your workspace, and checkout and kinetic-devel branch

cd aqbar_ws/src 
git clone https://github.com/ros-planning/panda_moveit_config/
cd panda_moveit_config
git checkout origin/kinetic-devel 

Finally we can build the two packages

cd aqbar_ws
catkin_make

Running launch files

You should now be able the simulated code with

roslaunch aqbar sim.launch

Or the physical code with

roslaunch aqbar ard.launch
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