Project Overview

This is a ROS project developed as part of ME495 - Embedded Systems in Robotics course at Northwestern University.

The goal of this project is to use the BAXTER robot and build a “HUGE” tower from plastic cups

You can find the Github repository at the following link:

github_repo

My role in this project was image processing using apriltags. I implemeted apriltag detection using apriltag_ros wrapper package and published cups’ transformation so that the Baxter would detect and keep track of the locations of the cups.

Demonstration

10 Cups Tower

6 Cups Tower

6 Cups sorting

Project Details

Gazebo Simulation

• Baxter Simulator
• Tool utilized to test code without real robot
• Get the position of the cups with get_model_state service
• Set cup pose with set_model_state

Rviz

• Moveit to set the planning Scene and Rviz visualizer
• To set the positions of the cups and tables
• To add the objects to the scene
• To return information about the scene

Robot Control

Let one hand first place what it’s grabbing, then let the other hand grab the next cup to place.

Computer Vision

• We used a aprtiltag_ros which is a ROS wrapper of the AprilTag to get x,y,z positions of the cups.
• We mainly used the Baxter’s right hand camera for tag deteection,but we gave options to use left camera or the head camera.
• Then simulator.py which is a MoveIt Python API coverts tf data to x,y,z positions and add positions and visual cylinders that represent cups to the scene that can be seen in Rviz
• Arm_control nodes use those positions for Baxter’s task for sorting or building cups

Project Team Members

Dimitrios Chamzas

Dong Ho Kang

Yuxiao Lai

Gabrielle Wink