NeueBot Controller

The NeueBot Controller is a high-level architecture controller for surgical applications.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS Kinetic (http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu)
• Eigen 3
• CoppeliaSim 3.6.2 (https://www.coppeliarobotics.com/previousVersions)

Installation

Setup OROCOS

Follow the oficial OROCOS documentation at https://docs.orocos.org/docs_main/installation.html.

👉 This was tested in a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 install.

For an easier setup, we will install the pre-compiled packages shipped as ROS debian packages,

$ sudo apt install ros-kinetic-rtt-ros-integration
$ sudo apt install ros-kinetic-kdl-conversions ros-kinetic-kdl-parser ros-kinetic-kdl-typekit

Setup Qt Creator

We followed this guide (https://ros-qtc-plugin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_source/How-to-Install-Users.html) to install a tweaked ROS Qt Creator. It will come in handy to configure the workspace.

In the ROS Qt Creator Plug-in wiki page, you can all the information on how to setup your ROS workspace, build and run settings, and much more.

💡 Don't forget that you want the Xenial version!

Setup V-REP CoppeliaSim

We provide the tools to test the controller in a simulated environment - CoppeliaSim. For legacy reasons, most of the packages will be named vrep something.

To setup the simulation environment you should create a separate directory to build the plugins.

$ cd ; mkdir coppelia_ws
$ git clone PROPER_REPO
$ tree -L 2 -d ~/coppelia_ws

coppelia_ws/
├── v_repExtSurgRobotControl
│   ├── include
│   ├── src
│   └── vrep
├── vrep_plugins
│   ├── v_repExtEndEffector
│   └── v_repExtKukaControl
└── vrep_scenes

For each of those directories, you want to create a build/ folder and build the plugin library, e.g.,

$ cd ~/coppelia_ws/v_repExtSurgRobotControl
$ mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..
$ make 

Setup Workspace

Before setting up our workspace, just make sure we have all the required dependencies.

Catkin tools

We can take advantage of the OROCOS ROS integration and use the awesome catkin_tools package to simplify our components' installation process.

Follow their installation process at https://catkin-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installing.html.

Eigen

As I pointed out in the pre-requisites, make sure you have Eigen3 somewhere in your machine. You can use the debian package,

$ sudo apt install libeigen3-dev

We will need to create a symbolic link as /usr/include/Eigen from the eigen3/Eigen folder,

$ sudo ln -s /usr/include/eigen3/Eigen /usr/include/Eigen

Reflexxes Motion Library

As of this moment, the PTP joint controller is based on the Reflexxes Type II library.

You can find download link for the library at http://www.reflexxes.ws/software/typeiirml/v1.2.6/docs/page__download_instructions.html.

From here, I recommend that you create a directory ~/neuebot_ws/deps to place any third party dependencies. Then, unzip the contents of the downloaded ReflexxesTypeII.zip there.

Go to ~/neuebot_ws/deps/ReflexxesTypeII/Linux and compile the library,

$ cd ~/neuebot_ws/deps/ReflexxesTypeII/Linux 
$ make clean64 all64

You should end-up with something like this,

$ tree -L 2 -d ~/neuebot_ws/deps

└── ReflexxesTypeII
    ├── include
    ├── Linux
    ├── MacOS
    ├── src
    └── Windows

You will want to create a *.cmake file to create the variables that point to the Reflexxes include and library directories. You can run the following commands to do just that,

$ cd ~/neuebot_ws/deps/ReflexxesTypeII/
$ echo 'set(PREFIX ${CMAKE_CURRENT_LIST_DIR})
set(ReflexxesTypeII_INCLUDE_DIR ${PREFIX}/include)
set(ReflexxesTypeII_LIBRARY_DEBUG ${PREFIX}/Linux/x64/debug/lib/shared/libReflexxesTypeII.so)
set(ReflexxesTypeII_LIBRARY_RELEASE ${PREFIX}/Linux/x64/release/lib/shared/libReflexxesTypeII.so)' > ReflexxesTypeIIConfig.cmake

Finally, the Workspace...

First, create a top-level directory where all the files related to the NeueBot Controller will be stored and clone our repo,

$ cd ; mkdir -p neuebot_ws/src; cd neuebot_ws
$ git clone <link>

We can now use the magic of catkin_tools to build our entire list of components,

$ cd ; cd neuebot_ws
$ catkin init

Make sure source your workspace environment, and create an environment variable to your workspace folder,

$ echo "source ~/neuebot_ws/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
$ echo "export WORKSPACE=~/neuebot_ws/src" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/neuebot_ws/devel/setup.bash

TODO: Remove the need for the environment variable.

You can list the components visible in your neuebot_ws/src folder. Some folders/components have a CATKIN_IGNORE empty file. Those are not ignored by catkin.

$ catkin list

<OUTPUT>

You can now compile the listed components,

$ catkin build

Hopefully everything went well! 🙏

Run the Controller

TODO: We use our own typekits to communicate between components. Although the OROCOS integration using ROS is pretty smooth, this feature is still lacking. We are testing some options to get this to work, will post an update soon.