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Home > Programming > Robotiq grippers on robot arm
mariaevinne

Hello,

I am a ROS user and I'm working with a robotiq gripper attached to an sia5 motoman arm. It looks like this:


I've got the arm working with just the articulated gripper model attached, but it doesn't open or close. I would like to have the gripper visually open and close in Rviz, similar to what Willow Garage did with their GraspIt! software: 


Instead of editing the hell out of my urdf, I'd like to ask if gripper visualization (i'm talking about opening/closing too) in Rviz already exists.

Samuel_Bouchard

@jproberge would you have a hint on this one?
jproberge

Hello @mariaevinne !

To be honest, it's been years since I've worked with robotiq's 3-fingers gripper in rviz, so I'm not sure I'll be able to help here. 

But, from what I can remember, Robotiq does not have an official urdf / xacro file for their S-Model gripper on their official Github. Rather, it seems they only have a urdf / xacro macro for the C-Model. From what I can remember, in the past, I used to follow guidelines from this link: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/drcsim/pull-requests/522/tuning-robotiq-hand-grasping/diff , which uses the (simplified) atlas description of the S-Model, the source of that is located here: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/drcsim/src/194be8500fef81593f79607a21ee2badd9700a0e/atlas_description/robots/?at=default , it was originally developed as part of the DRC simulation (so now outdated). I remember we were able to open and close the gripper using that model.

But as you will see, it's a very simplified model, and depending on the ros version you're using and your expectations about the accuracy of the gripper's modeling in rviz, you might have to update the procedure mentioned above. Other people could have developed more advanced models / functionality for simulating this gripper, but I don't know where / if that would be available.

Hope that could still provide a little help!

Regards