Supported Arms¶

Armer relies on the manipulator’s ROS driver to communicate with the low level hardware so the the ROS drivers must be started along side Armer.

For convenience, hardware packages consisting of a config file for setting run parameters and a launch file that launches Armer and the target manipulator’s drivers are bundled together.

Note

It is highly recommended to test the manipulator’s ROS drivers installation before attempting to use Armer to ensure a working base.

Arms with Armer hardware packages¶

Currently Armer has packages for several popular arms. If your arm model has a hardware package, control should be a fairly plug and play experience. (An experience we are still working on so please let us know if it isn’t.). Below are the github pages to arms with hardware packages. Install directions can be found on their respective pages.

Franka Panda: https://github.com/qcr/armer_panda
Universal Robot UR3: https://github.com/qcr/armer_ur
Universal Robot UR5: https://github.com/qcr/armer_ur
Universal Robot UR10: https://github.com/qcr/armer_ur
ABB IRB6700: https://github.com/qcr/armer_abb

Arms with Robotic Toolbox Models¶

Armer uses the kinematic model from the Robotics Toolbox (RTB) to calculate motion for an arm. If your arm exists as an RTB model, it is farily simple to point Armer to launch the model from the config file. See Creating a Config File.

To check if your arm model is supported by RTB out of the box, see the list of modules here for if they have the URDF suffix: https://petercorke.github.io/robotics-toolbox-python/_modules/index.html

It is recommended to follow the Creating a Hardware Package tutorial to help setup a hardware package for your arm if one does not exist.

Unsupported Arms¶

In the case of your manipulator of interest not having an Armer hardware package or an RTB model, a URDF model can be loaded into an RTB model so procedure with creating a hardware package can continue normally from there. See Creating a Robotics Toolbox model