Overview

ROS 2 workspace for controlling AgileX Piper arms from ROS 2 or DLS controllers.

The repository is based on AgileX's new driver stack:

• pyAgxArm for the Python CAN driver
• agx_arm_ros for the official ROS 2 control, message, description, and MoveIt packages

The local ROS package named piper_sdk is kept as a thin wrapper around pyAgxArm, so the SDK is installed by colcon build without using pip install --break-system-packages.

Repository Contents

This workspace contains the following packages:

• piper_sdk: ROS 2 wrapper around the pyAgxArm git submodule, automatically installed by colcon build
• agx_arm_ros: Official AgileX ROS 2 packages for control, messages, description, and MoveIt
• dls2_interface: Standard messages definition for DLS2
• dls2_piper_bridge: DLS2 hardware-abstraction-layer using the pyAgxArm API

Prerequisites

• Install ROS 2 Jazzy and initialize rosdep.

• Clone this repository including submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:iit-DLSLab/piper-ros2-dls.git
cd piper-ros2-dls

• Install rosdep dependencies:

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash
rosdep install -y --ignore-src --from-paths ros2_ws/src

• Install any system dependencies required by the official AgileX packages:

sudo apt install can-utils ethtool

Build

Build the ROS 2 workspace with:

cd ros2_ws
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Usage

Activate CAN-bus communication for the arm:

./ros2_ws/src/agx_arm_ros/scripts/can_activate.sh

Run the official AgileX ROS 2 arm controller:

source ros2_ws/install/setup.bash
ros2 launch agx_arm_ctrl start_single_agx_arm.launch.py can_port:=can0 arm_type:=piper_l effector_type:=agx_gripper tcp_offset:='[0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0]'

Run the DLS2 hardware-abstraction-layer node:

source ros2_ws/install/setup.bash
ros2 run dls2_piper_bridge piper_hal

The DLS2 bridge accepts the CAN interface as a ROS parameter:

ros2 run dls2_piper_bridge piper_hal --ros-args -p can_port:=can0

Maintainer

This repository is maintained by Giulio Turrisi.