Phantom X Pincher Arm on ROS Melodic/Noetic

[pytalha]

I want to run the good old Turtlebot PhantomX Pincher Arm on ROS Melodic/Noetic. I'm currently running ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18.04 and have been facing a lot of dependency issues. I can't open arbotix_gui, can't execute my motion plan on Rviz and can't find a working Gazebo launch file.

If anyone is still working with pincher arm on ROS Melodic/Noetic, please guide.

[corot]

I'm using the default turtlebot arm (with a static finger) in melodic and all works fine. But I'm not using arbotix anymore, but dynamixel_motor and the USB2AX to interface the motors.

[pytalha]

I'm using the default turtlebot arm (with a static finger) in melodic and all works fine. But I'm not using arbotix anymore, but dynamixel_motor and the USB2AX to interface the motors.

Is there a repo for further guidance? Would appreciate if you could walk me through the steps you took to use the Turtlebot arm without arbotix.

[bjsowa]

@pytalha I don't know if you resolved your issues or gave up, but if you are still looking for a solution, you can try these repository instead:
https://github.com/fictionlab/pincher_arm

The arbotix_gui is broken since Melodic if I remember correctly.

[corot]

Nice job, @bjsowa. Yours is defintly the reference repo to use the pitcher. I just link here my fork of tb_arm cause I did recently some improvements that may be useful to port for the pitcher:
melodic-devel...corot:melodic-devel
Mainly, I moved the gripper_link within the gripper paddles. I didn't bother to merge into tb_arm upstream cause I though that nobody was using it! But i'll do gladly if anyone is interested (actually, I posted the question in #38)

[bjsowa]

I actually made the URDF for pincher_arm_description mostly based on your fork, but I reworked the gripper description to fit the way I control it.

I assumed the turtlebot_arm_description is licensed under BSD (the package.xml says so), so I would appreciate if you could resolve #41 so I could reproduce the copyright notice in my packages.

[pytalha]

@pytalha I don't know if you resolved your issues or gave up, but if you are still looking for a solution, you can try these repository instead:
https://github.com/fictionlab/pincher_arm

The arbotix_gui is broken since Melodic if I remember correctly.

Does that mean that it won't work with arbotix controller? Could you please specify the controller if it needs to be replaced?

[bjsowa]

The pincher_arm packages use the Arbotix controller. It's just the arbotix_gui executable that is broken (see vanadiumlabs/arbotix_ros#49) so you won't be able to control the arm this way for now.