Package Summary

This stack contains hardware drivers, Gazebo plugins and other basic functionalities for the Neuronics Katana family of robot arms. Specifically, it provides:

JointTrajectory and FollowJointTrajectory execution on the physical arm (packages katana, kni, katana_trajectory_filter, katana_msgs),
simulation of the Katana arm in Gazebo (packages katana_gazebo_plugins, katana_arm_gazebo),
URDF descriptions (package katana_description),
simple teleoperation (packages katana_teleop, katana_joint_movement_adapter), and
some demo programs (package katana_tutorials).

Author: Maintained by Martin Günther, Henning Deeken
License: GPL
Source: git http://kos.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/katana_driver.git (branch: electric)

Installation

This package is released as binaries, so you can just type:

sudo apt-get install ros-electric-katana-driver

Running the Katana stack

You should set your Katana type as an environment variable, for example in your .bashrc/.zshrc. At the moment, only the Katana 450 6M90A and the Katana 300 6M180 (experimental) are supported. Include one of the following lines:

export KATANA_TYPE="katana_300_6m180"
export KATANA_TYPE="katana_450_6m90a"

Katana standalone

To start the Katana node for a real robot arm, run:

roslaunch katana katana.launch

If you want to run the Gazebo simulation, run:

roslaunch katana_arm_gazebo katana_arm.launch

While one of those launch files is running, you can move the arm around using the keyboard (only on real arm, not in Gazebo):

roslaunch katana_teleop katana_teleop_key.launch

To test if following joint trajectories work, launch the following file:

roslaunch katana_tutorials follow_joint_trajectory_client.launch

Warning: This will move the robot arm without any obstacle avoidance whatsoever, so if you run this on a physical arm, make sure the workspace of the robot is clear.

Katana + MoveIt!

MoveIt has to be configured individually for each robot. At Osnabrück University, we have Calvin, a robot that consists of a Volksbot base and a Katana arm. You can see instructions how to run the full MoveIt stack in Gazebo, including motion planning, inverse kinematics, collision environment etc. on the calvin_robot wiki page.

Documentation

This whole stack is being actively developed. If you use these packages and have any comments/bug reports/patches, or would like to contribute, don't hesitate to contact us!

Report a Bug

Use GitHub to report bugs or submit feature requests. [View active issues]