Awesome
ros_kortex
ROS Kortex is the official ROS package to interact with Kortex and its related products. It is built upon the Kortex API, documentation for which can be found in the GitHub Kortex repository.
Download links
You can refer to the Kortex repository "Download links" section to download the firmware package and the release notes.
Accessing the color and depth streams
To access the color and depth streams, you will need to clone and follow the instructions to install the ros_kortex_vision repository .
Installation
Setup
- Robot Operating System (ROS) (middleware for robotics)
This package has been tested under ROS Kinetic (Ubuntu 16.04) and ROS Melodic (Ubuntu 18.04). You can find the instructions to install ROS Kinetic here and ROS Melodic here.
Google Protocol Buffers is used by Kinova to define the Kortex APIs and to automatically generate ROS messages, services and C++ classes from the Kortex API .proto
files. The installation of Google Protocol Buffers is required by developers implementing new APIs with the robot. However, since we already provide all the necessary generated files on GitHub, this is not required for most end users of the robot.
Build
These are the instructions to run in a terminal to create the workspace, clone the ros_kortex
repository and install the necessary ROS dependencies:
sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
sudo python3 -m pip install conan==1.59
conan config set general.revisions_enabled=1
conan profile new default --detect > /dev/null
conan profile update settings.compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11 default
mkdir -p catkin_workspace/src
cd catkin_workspace/src
git clone -b <branch-name> https://github.com/Kinovarobotics/ros_kortex.git
cd ../
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -y
<branch-name>
corresponds to the branch matching your ROS version (noetic-devel, melodic-devel, kinetic-devel)
Instructions are for conan V1.X only and it won't work for versions >=2.0.0
Then, to build and source the workspace:
catkin_make
source devel/setup.bash
You can also build against one of the ARMv8 builds of the Kortex API with Conan if you specify the CONAN_TARGET_PLATFORM
CMake argument when using catkin_make
. The following platforms are supported:
-
Artik 710:
catkin_make --cmake-args -DCONAN_TARGET_PLATFORM=artik710 source devel/setup.bash
-
IMX6:
catkin_make --cmake-args -DCONAN_TARGET_PLATFORM=imx6 source devel/setup.bash
-
NVidia Jetson:
catkin_make --cmake-args -DCONAN_TARGET_PLATFORM=jetson source devel/setup.bash
As you see, there are instructions to install the Conan package manager. You can learn more about why we use Conan or how to simply download the API and link against it in this specific section of the kortex_driver readme. You can also decide
<p><details close> <summary>Conan SSL Error</summary>While running catkin_make
, you may get a SSL Certificate error similar to this
ERROR: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='artifactory.kinovaapps.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /artifactory/api/conan/conan/v1/ping (Caused by SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: certificate has expired (_ssl.c:1131)')))
This is because Conan's root certificate expired on 2021-09-30
You can fix this by running
conan config install https://github.com/conan-io/conanclientcert.git
</details></p>
Contents
The following is a description of the packages included in this repository.
kortex_control
This package implements the simulation controllers that control the arm in Gazebo. For more details, please consult the README from the package subdirectory.
Note The ros_control
controllers for the real arm are not yet implemented and will be in a future release of ros_kortex
.
kortex_description
This package contains the URDF (Unified Robot Description Format), STL and configuration files for the Kortex-compatible robots. For more details, please consult the README from the package subdirectory.
kortex_driver
This package implements a ROS node that allows communication between a node and a Kinova Gen3 or Gen3 lite robot. For more details, please consult the README from the package subdirectory.
kortex_examples
This package holds all the examples needed to understand the basics of ros_kortex
. Most of the examples are written in both C++ and Python. Only the MoveIt! example is available exclusively in Python for now.
A more detailed description can be found in the package subdirectory.
kortex_gazebo
This package contains files to simulate the Kinova Gen3 and Gen3 lite robots in Gazebo. For more details, please consult the README from the package subdirectory.
kortex_move_it_config
This metapackage contains the auto-generated MoveIt! files to use the Kinova Gen3 and Gen3 lite arms with the MoveIt! motion planning framework. For more details, please consult the README from the package subdirectory.
third_party
This folder contains the third-party packages we use with the ROS Kortex packages. Currently, it consists of two packages used for the simulation of the Robotiq Gripper in Gazebo. We use gazebo-pkgs for grasping support in Gazebo and roboticsgroup_gazebo_plugins to mimic joint support in Gazebo.