This project was realized with the help of Simon L. Wanstall, Ben Johnson, Reka Hegedus, Cliff T. Mwando, John J. Gibson, Ryan Davidson and Shaun Whitley for the course Robotic Mechanical Systems of Heriot-Watt University. My part was to perform the integration, control and simulation of the system in the ROS environement. The simulation of the arm and the gripper is performed in Gazebo the STL files. The control of the arm with the Vive Controlle is done by using the library ROS# (https://github.com/siemens/ros-sharp) with create a bridge between a Unity simulation to get the VR Controler input and the ROS environment. A color filtering algorithm (OpenCV) has also been implemented to estimated the distance of the object and to help the user during the operation.
A demonstration video of the complete system is available at this link: https://youtu.be/_j6-osMOJu4 Taking an object using the arm is available at this link : https://youtu.be/HLE-T5zqX5c