Table of Contents
Dynamixel Motors: ROS Interface
This section refers you to instructions for installing the ROS Dynamixel motor stack as well as associated tutorials to operate the motors on ROS.
Prerequisite: This assumes:
- instructions in hardware setup have been completed.
- you are operating on a Ubuntu release with an appropriate distribution of ROS already installed
Install Dynamixel Motor Stack
We will clone a repository forked from Anton Rebgun's dynamixel_motor repository. The final version of ROS supported by this motor controller stack was ROS 1 kinetic (Python 2.7). Our lab-maintained fork of this repository has been updated to support ROS1 melodic and beyond (Python 3); ROS2 is not supported.
If you haven't yet created a catkin workspace, open a terminal and run the following:
$ source /opt/ros/%ROS_DISTRO%/setup.bash $ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src $ cd ~/catkin_ws/ $ catkin build
where '%ROS_DISTRO%' should be replaced with the ROS distribution installed on your system (e.g. melodic, noetic).
The following is derived from instructions found on the ROS.org page for the Dynamixel motor stack . It will clone the forked and lab-maintained repository into your catkin workspace: https://github.com/ivaROS/ivaDynamixel . It presumes your catkin workspace is located per the instructions above:
cd ~/catkin_ws/src git clone https://github.com/ivaROS/ivaDynamixel.git
ROS Dynamixel Motor Tutorial
Follow this tutorial for the ROS Dynamixel motor stack.
It will guide you through useful tools to communicate with connected motors. A walk-through is additionally provided to configure a pan-tilt motor arrangement and program a ROS node to operate it.