Addendum on Grasping

[pattacini]

As I've recently developed a sandbox providing a simple 🚶🏻‍♂️ walkthrough for grasping in Gazebo, driven by sheer curiosity, I took the chance to concatenate that work to this experiment and – with only a couple of hours of customization – I got the nice addition demonstrated in the 🎥 animation below recorded in Gitpod (I needed to speed it up 4x as in Gitpod we don't have quantum computers):

If you want to experiment yourself, you can spawn a workspace from the snapshot I made available (click on the blue badge) and then from a terminal opened up in the GUI launch the script icub-grasp.sh:

In a nutshell, the snapshot contains a hack of the original sandbox in order to:

• Segment the object as a collection of reddish pixels above the table (clearly, in a real setting this approach is not robust enough).
• Use the ODE physics engine instead of DART since the latter, although it is a better choice for grasping, slows down the simulation too much (thus, grasping is not simulated very accurately). By contrast, if one will rely on a local installation or GPU-enabled dockers, then DART can be reinstated.
• Fiddle with the hand pre-grasp configuration to accommodate for the quite big cube.
• Tune the movements to reduce oscillations.
• Clean up unnecessary things.

cc @Nicogene @vvasco @maggia80

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In case my Gitpod workspace underneath the snapshot will vanish in the future (I usually clean up my storage 😉), here's the 📦 package containing the code variant find the latest package below.

[pattacini]

One could also think of dumping the encoders while iCub performs grasping so that then those trajectories can be played back using the wholeBodyPlayer.

The Gitpod snapshot above has been updated accordingly, whereas this is the 📦 latest Gitpod package containing the code variant plus some dumps.