ROS Commander Reference Guide

Arm Movement

• Joint Sequence: Sends the arm to a set of static joint angles. Ideal for constructing gestures.

• Velocity Priority: Sends the gripper's tip to a set 3D positions according to a strict time schedule, keeping the velocity of the motion as close to the original motion as possible. This command will try to figure out what joint angles the arm need to be in to get the gripper to a specific pose, however, it may fail if the elbow or forearm is not in the correct orientation. Fix by preceding with a joint sequence command to set the elbow and forearm positions.

• Position Priority: Sends the gripper's tip to a single 3D position, keeping the path traveled by the gripper as close to the original recorded motion as possible. As this command will try for as long as it can to get to that position (until it timeouts), the speed of the motion might deviate from the original motion's.

• Safe Move: Sends the arm to a set of static joint angles, will try to keep the arm from colliding with other objects. However, the motion will fail if the arm is initially in contact with something (such as holding an object) or the destination set of joint angles causes the arm to be in contact. It might also fail if the robot hallucinates obstacles.

Head Movement

• Move Head: Moves the head through a series of joint angle keyframes (or pan and tilt angles). This is the head analogue of the Joint Sequence tool.

• Look At: Points the head at a 3D point. Instead of specifying pan and tilt angles, allow you to specify a 3D point instead. Useful for pointing the head things that are going to be manipulated like taskframes.

Base Movement

• Navigate (planner): Coarsely moves the robot using its base to another location while avoiding obstacles. To use this command, the arms must first be in a tucked state. Most common failures occur when the tilting laser range finder (on the robot's chest) hallucinate obstacles. To fix this, move the robot around a little bit with the base navigation arrows. The command can be canceled by clicking on the big red sphere that appears around the robot.

• Navigate (precise): Moves the robot to another location but does not avoid obstacles. However, it is much more accurate at positioning the robot. As this tool completely ignores all obstacles, it's a good idea to only move the robot a few centimeters at first. NOTE: THIS TOOL CAN BE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

Other

• Gripper Tool: Opens and closes the gripper.

• Speak Tool: text-to-speech tool. The speech engine might pronounce words oddly. The normal workaround is to misspell your words or spell them phonetically to trick it into producing more intelligible speech.

Common Problems/Pitfalls

• If your behavior is too big to fit on screen, right clicking and dragging the view will scroll it.
• Remember to select the correct arm when there is an arm selection option.

• If your behavior fails, step through it by starting at the beginning, click on it node by node, then clicking Try at each node. This will pinpoint the offending node.