Source install of the Shadow Robot Stack - Development version

These instructions will help you install the Shadow Robot stack directly from the sources. If you discover problems installing them on other platforms, please contact us: ugo@shadowrobot.com or contact@shadowrobot.com

Installation Instructions

These instructions cover installing the Shadow Robot stack from the trunk of our code hosted on launchpad. To get more information about our robots, please refer to the Shadow Robot page.

The trunk should be relatively stable. If you plan on modifying our interface, you should use this method as you'll get the most up-to-date code.

You should have a running copy of ROS already installed on your computer before going further. Please refer to the ROS Installation Instruction

1. Installation

You just need to get the code (in this example I download the code in ~/Projects, but you can put it anywhere you want):

$ cd ~/Projects
$ bzr branch lp:sr-ros-interface

And then, add the path for the shadow_robot stack to your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH variable. You'll need to modify the path to point to where you downloaded the code. You should probably add this line to your .bashrc after where you source the ROS setup.bash file.

$ export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/home/hand/Projects/sr-ros-interface/shadow_robot:${ROS_PACKAGE_PATH}

2. Building the code

2.1. sr_hand Package

There are different ways of compiling the sr_hand package:

• Dummy Interface: You can run:

$ rosmake sr_hand

• Gazebo support:

$ GAZEBO=1 rosmake sr_hand

• Real Hand support: please make sure you're installing this on a computer having a working copy of our own robot code. You received one with the Hardware.

$ REAL_HAND=1 rosmake sr_hand

• Real Arm support: please make sure you're installing this on a computer having a working copy of our own robot code. You received one with the Hardware.

$ REAL_ARM=1 rosmake sr_hand

• Valves support: Add support for the valves of the Shadow Robot muscles. Please make sure you're installing this on a computer having a working copy of our own robot code. You received one with the Hardware.

$ VALVES=1 rosmake sr_hand

2.2. Building the extra packages

You can also build a set of extra packages, which can be useful to control our hardware:

$ rosmake sr_control_gui cyberglove sr_remappers sr_tactile_sensors

If you want to build useful ROS packages for our stack, such as Rviz, Gazebo, etc... just run:

$ rosmake sr_convenient_dependencies

Please note that you need a decent computer to run some of those.