Design and implementation of a robotic arm using ROS and MoveIt!

In this paper is presented an interfacing of a robotic arm with a motion planner and a 3D viewer (RViz). The main purpose of this work, is to manipulate and grip objects to transport them from one location to another using Robot Operating System (ROS). In order to do this task, a motion planner, who deal with constraints, i.e. collisions among the arm joints and objects, is used. Also a 3D viewer, called RViz, is used to visualize (online and offline) the motion of the arm. To easily interface the 3 degree of freedom (DOF) arm, it was designed using FreeCAD, as the output files used to print the arm, are simultaneously exported to create the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) files required for the planner and viewer. A position-force controller for the gripper, previously presented, has been used to pick up and hold the object during the manipulation. Some experiments where carried out to asses the result of the interface, the execution of the motion planning avoiding collision and the grasp to the object. These results are shown and discussed.