From OpenRAVE

Shows how to setup a full robot system with OpenRAVE, Robot Operating System (ROS), and the CMU ROS packages. Any robot system should deal with autonomous manipulation with vision feedback, sensor loops, and higher-level reasoning.

• Installation - Setting up the system
• Working with Cameras

Using OpenRAVE with ROS

OpenRAVE can be used in many different scenarios.

• There is one openrave instance that does the planning and you would like all controllers/sensor feeding that to it. We'll call this the Master
• There are openrave instances outside of the Master that wrap hardware/simulation controllers, generate simulated sensor data. These instances publish to the ROS network and usually feed into the Master openrave.

OpenRAVE plugins connecting to ROS

There are several openrave/ros plugins that create nodes internally and advertise/subscribe to messages. These plugins can be found in these ROS packages:

• openrave_sensors - subscribe to ROS messages for getting sensor data into openrave (loaded by Master)
• openrave_robot_control - simple session interface for controlling robots over the ROS network with openrave being the underlying client. You'll notice in the lib folder is a librobot_control.so openrave plugin which the Master loads)
• schunk_motion_controllers - connects to the hardware Schunk interfaces and advertises services to control a robot.
• orrosplanning - misc plugins for reading sensing data and displaying it into openrave. For example, if there is a node plublishing checkerboard_detector/ObjectDetection messages, it is possible to use the ObjectTransform openrave SensorSystem interface to display the objects inside the environment.

Component Tutorials

• Controlling Robots - Controlling robots through ROS using OpenRAVE
• openraveros server - Controlling an openrave-core through the ROS network.
• Sensors - Publishing openrave sensor data through ROS.