Can two Sawyer robotic arms be controlled with one laptop?

[lhqin]

Hi, everyone, I have a question and hope to get your help. We have already one Sawyer robotic arm in our lab at present. But required by the tasks, we need to use two robotic arms simultaneously.  We want to buy another Sawyer robotic arm to make them work together. My question is whether it is feasible that we use one laptop running the ros platform to control two robotic arms simultaneously. In the tutorial documentation, I only find examples for one robotic arm. But how should two robotic arms be connected to one laptop via the network cable in hardware? And is there an example to setup an environment for the controlling of two Sawyer robotic arms synchronously? Thank you.

[Shiwei Wang]

Hi Ihqin,

Thank you for being Sawyer SDK user! 

The short answer is Yes!  To control two robots, you can have two terminals opened, set up the robot host to a robot and in another terminal set up the robot host to another robot. 

For the interaction between two robots, you can write the script to set up communication or try running ROS in multiple machines: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/MultipleMachines

Here is a cool video related with your question using our Baxter robots:  'Tele-operating Coordinated Tasks of Two-Baxter Robots with Compliant Behaviors'

 

 

Hope this helps!

-Shiwei

 

[lhqin]

7 hours ago, Shiwei said:

Hi Ihqin,

Thank you for being Sawyer SDK user! 

The short answer is Yes!  To control two robots, you can have two terminals opened, set up the robot host to a robot and in another terminal set up the robot host to another robot. 

For the interaction between two robots, you can write the script to set up communication or try running ROS in multiple machines: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/MultipleMachines

Here is a cool video related with your question using our Baxter robots:  'Tele-operating Coordinated Tasks of Two-Baxter Robots with Compliant Behaviors'

 

 

Hope this helps!

-Shiwei

 

Hi, Shiwei,

  Thanks for your reply. The video looks great. And I have seen it before. If using two terminals, it should be feasible to control two sawyer robots at the same time. But two programming scripts will be needed and the synchronicity between their executions will be hard to control. Delay will exist between the actual executions of programming scripts for the two robot arms, which may vary based on the start of running the two programs and thus inconvenient. 

  Does there exist a method to control two robotic arms in a terminal? For example, setting both the robot host at the beginning, i.e. including the IP address of both in intera.sh file. And then define one arm as left limb and the other as right limb in the following programs. If it is possible, it will be very convenient to finish more tasks using two Sawyer robotic arms.

  Thank you.

[Shiwei Wang]

Hello lhqin,

Currently, in 'intera.sh' file you can only set up one robot, to achieve the goal, extra scripts are needed, you can try:

https://robotraconteur.com/

the Robot Raconteur, which is a communication framework for robotics.

Here is the GitHub example for Baxter Robot Raconteur Bridge: 

https://github.com/rpiRobotics/baxter_rr_bridge

You should be able to use the example in the link above to set up the bridge between two robots with some changes for Sawyer. There is a document called 'BaxterBridge_Documentation.pdf', it will be helpful for you.

Hope this helps,  let me know if you have any other question.

-Shiwei

 

[lhqin]

1 hour ago, Shiwei said:

Hello lhqin,

Currently, in 'intera.sh' file you can only set up one robot, to achieve the goal, extra scripts are needed, you can try:

https://robotraconteur.com/

the Robot Raconteur, which is a communication framework for robotics.

Here is the GitHub example for Baxter Robot Raconteur Bridge: 

https://github.com/rpiRobotics/baxter_rr_bridge

You should be able to use the example in the link above to set up the bridge between two robots with some changes for Sawyer. There is a document called 'BaxterBridge_Documentation.pdf', it will be helpful for you.

Hope this helps,  let me know if you have any other question.

-Shiwei

 

Hi, Shiwei,

  Thank you a lot. I will have a try to find out if it is feasible. If it works, I'll also let you know. Thanks again.

[Rachel Hoffman]

Please let me know if you get this running! I will also working to coordinate two Sawyer arms at the same time.

-Rachel Hoffman