ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on control of robot arms, the Baxter robot simulator, which runs in Gazebo. The grippers on the Baxter simulation model are electric, parallel-jaw grippers available from ReThink Robotics. The chapter explores forward and inverse kinematics, use of the joint-space planner, a Baxter-specific Cartesian planner, and a higher-level action server for planning and execution of object grasping. Implementation of forward and inverse kinematics functions for Baxter's right arm appears in package baxterfkik as a library with source code baxterfkik.cpp. Considerable offline robot programming can be developed using this simulator. Offline development in robot operating system (ROS) and Gazebo offers attractive productivity improvements in code development. Launching rviz allows a user to visualize more information about the robot. Frames corresponding to arm joints are also displayed for the robot's right arm. The class Arm Motion Commander encapsulates some of the action server–action client interactions, which helps to make the Cartesian-move action client simpler.
