electric fuerte   Documentation Status

Overview

Shadow is one of the longest running robotics companies in the UK. We have been developing robots and other unusual technologies since 1987. For the last 5 years, along with a wide selection of robotics contract engineering, Shadow has specialised in the development of dexterous manipulation for humanoid robotics. This has lead to the creation of the worlds most advanced robot hand, The Shadow Dexterous Hand, currently in version C6.

Here's a video showing our Hand being tele-operated using our ROS interface:

And here's a screencast of the simulated Dexterous Hand and Shadow Arm automatically grasping a coke can, using the manipulation stack. This is under heavy development.

For the etherCAT version of our hand, please refer to shadow_robot_etherCAT.

Documentation

This stack contains different useful package for the Shadow Robot hardware, as well as interfaces to 3rd party accessories used in controlling our robots.

1. sr_hand: the main package of this stack. Contains both simulated and real interface to the Shadow Robot Dexterous Hand and Arm.

2. cyberglove: a ROS interface for Immersion Cyberglove.

3. sr_control_gui: a modular GUI used to control the hand and arm.

4. sr_remappers: One of its main use is to remap data coming from the Cyberglove to the Hand targets.

5. sr_robot_msgs: a package containing diverse ROS messages and services used in the shadow_robot stack.

6. sr_tactile_sensors: Contains both a simulated and a real interface to the Tactile Sensors installed in our Hand.

7. threeD_mouse: A ROS interface to the 3DConnexion 6D mouse.

8. sr_convenient_dependencies: a package containing useful dependencies, for ease of use when compiling the full system.

Installation Instructions

Please refer to the Shadow Robot page to see the different ways of getting our code running.

A complete set of detailed instructions can be found here.

Contributing

Reporting a bug

Our bug tracking system is hosted on our launchpad page. Reporting a bug or adding a feature request is very helpful for us.

Even better, if you have a bug and its solution, you can submit a bug report with a patch (or add a patch to an existing bug). To generate the patch, it's very simple: just run:

roscd sr_hand
bzr diff > my_patch.patch

and upload my_patch.patch to the bug tracker.

Proposing new features - bzr crash course

We're always happy to get contributions to our code, and are here to help, so don't hesitate to contact us!

The best way of contributing is to branch one of our publicly available branches available on launchpad. If you haven't already configured bzr, you can run (don't forget to replace the login and info):

bzr launchpad-login your_launchpad_login
bzr whoami Your Full Name <youremail@mail.com>

You also need to upload your ssh key to launchpad (if you go to your launchpad page (https://launchpad.net/~your_login), you can add it from here).

Let's say you want to contribute to the trunk branch. Go to a prompt and run the command:

bzr branch lp:sr-ros-interface

Then push it to your own branch hosted on launchpad (you need to replace your_login by your launchpad login, and contrib by the name you want to give your branch):

bzr push --create-prefix lp:~your_login/contrib

You're now working on your own branch and can commit / push your modifications there. If you're used to using svn, you should probable bind your branch:

bzr bind lp:~your_login/contrib

Once the branch is bound, each time you do a commit (bzr ci -m "your comment"), the changes are pushed directly to the launchpad server.

Once your code is mature enough to be merged with the parent branch, you can submit a merge request on your branch page in launchpad, by clicking the Propose for merging button. We will then review and integrate your modifications into our code.