Sawyer with Kinect, octomap fails to generate in Rviz

[Bruce]

Hi everyone,

 

My group is working on a human-robot collaboration project. We are trying to use a Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect with the Sawyer robot. The Kinect is functioning properly and, in fact, when we run roslaunch sawyer_moveit_config sawyer_moveit.launch Kinect:=true electric_gripper:=true, it brings up Rviz and we can visualize the point-cloud generated by the Kinect. However, the octomap does not show up in Rviz. We tried to remove the name space “move_group” in the “sawyer_moveit_sensor_manager.launch.xml” under “moveit_sawyer_config” directory as suggested by this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/moveit-users/Fz-Hxhjr5zI.

It didn’t work for us.

 

Next, we looked on the Baxter Research Robot Community forum and found similar, if not identical questions, that were asked back in 2013. The supposed issue is that clock time on the robot computer and time on my development PC are desynchronized. (as suggested by this thread: https://groups.google.com/a/rethinkrobotics.com/forum/#!searchin/brr-users/lookup$20would$20require/brr-users/9z3h8etJkp0/Pkn4p-J0t3gJ). When we run the launch file, we get the warning:

 

[ WARN ] [1499805321.709597996]: Unable to transform object from frame ‘camera_link’ to planning frame ‘/base’ (Lookup would require extrapolation into the past. Requested time 1499805321.720482463 but the earliest data is at time 1499805348.802233425, when looking up transform from frame [camera_link] to frame [base])

 

Also mentioned in the thread, there was a patch released to fix this issue. However, our softwares are up to date on both the robot computer and our development PC and we are still having this clock desynchronization issue. We are out of ideas as to how to fix this problem. Could anyone please give us some guidance with this issue? 

 

Thanks in advance for the help. 

Bruce

[Acwok]

Hi Bruce,

I just saw this post. I replied to you on mine this morning http://rethinkrobotics.interaforum.com/topic/106-moveit-octomap-not-displayed-in-rviz-ros-indigo/ (maybe you haven't received a notification mail because you're not the OP). Anyway, I think both issues are related.

If you have followed my solution from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/moveit-users/Fz-Hxhjr5zI, the PointCloudOctomapUpdater plugin should work and try to display it on MoveIt!, BUT TO DO THAT I suppose it needs the base to camera_link transform, and that's another problem. I think you just have to synchronise your robot and PC clocks. I explained everything and suggested solutions on the other post this morning, let me know if it helped.

Clément

[Bruce]

Hi Clement, 

Thanks for replying. I responded on your post. it looks like it is a clock synchronization issue. However, I'm not familiar with setting up NTP server as suggested in your solution, could you please help me out on that, or maybe point me to the right resources. 

Bruce