Planning-on-VKC

A motion planning framework for Augmented Kinematic Representation (AKR).

Only tested with ROS Noetic for Ubuntu 20.04.

1. Installation

1.1 Preparation

Firstly, the following dependencies need to be manually installed and set up.

• ROS Noetic: we use ROS noetic as our basic platform.

After installing the dependencies above, follow the steps below to set the environment

Before compiling our package, several system dependencies need to be installed, use the following command to install

sudo apt install python3-catkin-tools ros-noetic-octomap-msgs ros-noetic-octomap \
ros-noetic-ompl ros-noetic-octomap-ros ros-noetic-lms1xx ros-noetic-ifopt

1.2 Clone repositories

We recommend cloning the repository instead of downloading files to avoid submodule errors.

Be sure you have added ssh key to GitHub account to clone the submodules.

Cloning the repositories(especially submodules) may take up to hours, depending on your network connection.

cd projects
git clone -b release git@github.com:zyjiao4728/Planning-on-VKC.git --recurse-submodules
cd Planning-on-VKC
git submodule update --init --recursive --progress
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
catkin build

where <github-package-url> is the GitHub download URL of our package.

You can build a Docker image for VKC and run the example of using a stick to pick a ball by the following commands

cd Planning-on-VKC
docker build -t vkc:test .
sh ./x11-docker-with-ros.sh
source ./devel/setup.bash
roslaunch vkc_example household_env.launch

Note: Use --dry-run to list the packages which will be built.

2. Run Examples

2.1 Examples come with the Tesseract package:

source <path-to-src>/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch tesseract_ros_example <example-name>.launch

2.2 Examples come with the vkc package:

2.2.1 Example of using a stick to pick a ball:

The demo shows how a robot tries to pick an object with a tool and operate an articulated object such as opening a cabinet door.

source <path-to-src>/devel/setup.bash
roslaunch vkc_example household_env.launch