Chapter 5. Creating Your First Robot Arm (in Simulation)
In this chapter, you will begin to understand the control of robot arms with ROS. We will show a simple three-link, two-joint, articulated robotic arm in simulation. The simulated robot arm, rrbot, has two revolute joints that will help you to understand the operations of a physical robot arm, without the complexities that more joints would create. We will use the URDF elements described in Chapter 2, Creating Your First Two-Wheeled ROS Robot (in Simulation) and incorporate the advantages of Xacro to make our code more modular and efficient. We will also include a mesh design for our gripper, and add control elements for the arm and gripper to our URDF. Next, we will show various ways to control the robot arm in Gazebo.
In this chapter, you will learn the following:
- The advantages of using Xacro in a URDF
- Designing a three-link, two-joint robotic arm using Xacro and mesh files
- Controlling the arm in Gazebo using ROS commands...
