Backwards Compatibility

[lr101095]

I recently updated to Intera 5.2 on my personal PC.

However, i work in a lab and Sawyer is being shared among other lab techs.

As it stands, the robot is only on Intera 5.1.2. Is there anyway i can still run the robot while having 5.2 on my pc but working with 5.1.2 on the actual robot?

i dont want to update sawyer just yet because it might affect the performance for other users. i also dont want to downgrade my laptop back to 5.1 because i'm making use of the sawyer simulation.

please advise. any help is much appreciated.

[Ian McMahon]

The short answer is no, the SDK releases are tied to particular versions of compatibility on the Sawyer robot. This is needed because some interfaces or ROS messages *onboard the robot* change between releases, which could lead you to the "ROS message md5 sum mismatch" error if you tried to use a different version of the SDK with the real robot and the message you need has changed. You can see the compatibility version dictionary directly inside the SDK: https://github.com/RethinkRobotics/intera_sdk/blob/master/intera_interface/src/intera_interface/settings.py

With that said, the SDK is open source, and you can modify that settings file as you like to force the SDK to work with a different version of the robot. I would not recommend this, as some messages will be broken. Rethink will not have tested and QA'd that software combination, and we cannot support any errors you run into as a result.

Final thought, Sawyer in Gazebo requires you to be running Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic, so you might needed to upgrade your workstation if you'd like to use Sawyer in Gazebo. Hope this helps!

~ Ian