Use gripper control as an example of controlling Baxter's grippers.

• Overview
• Running the Example:
  • Usage (Keyboard Control)
  • Joystick Control
• Troubleshooting

Uses the keyboard or joystick to control Baxters grippers. Position, velocity, holding, and moving force can be controlled and sensed. Both logitech and xbox game controllers are supported.

Start gripper control from an RSDK terminal session using:

$ rosrun baxter_examples gripper_keyboard.py

IMPORTANT: You will have to calibrate both grippers before using any of the other commands using C/c commands:

Once calibrated, future calibrate commands will not do anything unless you send a 'reset' first.

Get a list of commands by entering '?'

You can monitor the changes you are making using the following rostopics which you can monitor from a different shell:

rostopic echo /robot/end_effector/left_gripper/command

rostopic echo /robot/end_effector/right_gripper/command

To use the example gripper program using a joystick game controller to control the grippers:

First ensure that joy drivers are installed.

$ rospack find joy

If not run:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-joystick-drivers

To run the example:

$ roslaunch baxter_examples gripper_joystick.launch joystick:=<joystick_type>

Where <joystick_type> is 'xbox', 'logitech', or 'ps3'.
(If using a ps3, make sure you run the node from the ROS ps3joy package in a separate sudo terminal. See instructions here: ps3joy )

Note: This method uses an included ROS launch file to start both the gripper example and joy_node using the roslaunch tool. You can exit the gripper example by hitting any keyboard key, however you will have to ctrl-c to also cleanup the joy_node.

NOTE: Don't forget to calibrate each gripper first.

Press any keyboard key to quit. (And no, the 'joystick left <-> robot right' mappings are not typos; they assume the user is in front of the robot when using the joystick.)

For common issues specific to using gripper_control with Baxter, check out the Troubleshooting page.