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Question

Any general advice before I start working with the PX-100?

Answer

  1. Fix the bug in Interbotix's source code. There's a bug in Interbotix's source code that you should fix before you start working with the arm. Unless, that is, someone already fixed it for you. Ask Professor Salas about this, and read the entry api-fix.md.
  2. Study previous projects that used the arm. The most helpful are probably Fiducial Pick and Place and Pnp. But this is only because they in turn referenced previous projects, like ArmCam.
  3. When stuck and previous projects don't provide an answer, dig into Interbotix's source code. Most of the source code you'll need is probably here. Yes, it's a lot of code, and to make sense of it you might have to dig into other repositories that interbotix offers. But this is good practice for working with code "in the real world". You'll have to do it anyway, presuming you want to work in industry. Why not start now?
  4. Sometimes your computer just fails to detect the arm. RViz will show scary white boxes where the robot's limbs should be. Don't worry! You (probably) didn't break the arm. Just do a hard restart of it: unplug and replug the data and power chords from the arm. That should fix the problem.
  5. Getting the arm to move as you want is hard. Have patience, and try to troubleshoot in a methodical, rational manner. It's really hard! Especially if you don't have a strong math background, and have to rely on Interbotix's official API. The set_ee_cartesian_trajectory method, for example, tells you how much of the trajectory the API successfully calculated, but not why it failed or succeeded as much as it did. Still, don't worry: there are probably easier ways around your problem than trying to do a crash course on inverse or forward kinematics. Reference previous projects done at the lab and see how they solved their problems.