forcetorque-yarp-devices

YARP Device Drivers for various commercial Six Axis Force Torque sensors.

Rationale

This repository contains YARP Device Drivers (see YARP documentation on devices ) for exposing various commercial Six Axis Force Torque sensors in a YARP network. The repo contains the following YARP devices :

• forcetorqueDriverExample : Template of a generic YARP driver for a Six Axis Force Torque sensor.
• amti : Drivers for the AMTI force plates system.

Installation

Dependencies

• YARP
• For AMTI device: AMTI SDK (ask to AMTI for the libraries)

Step-by-step installation

• Install YARP on your platform, following the instructions on YARP documentation.
• Compile the code in this repository using CMake and your preferred compiler. See YARP documentation on how to compile a CMake project.
• Note that by default all devices are active. Deactivate the device you don't want to compile.
• Install the compiled devices. You can specify the installation directory using the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX CMake option.
• Add ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/share/forcetorque-yarp-devices (where ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX} needs to be substituted to the directory that you choose as the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX) to your YARP_DATA_DIRS enviromental variable (for more on the YARP_DATA_DIRS env variable, see YARP documentation on data directories ).
• Once you do that, you should be able to find the devices compiled by this repo (for example the forcetorqueDriverExample) using the command yarp plugin forcetorqueDriverExample, which should have an output similar to:

Yes, this is a YARP plugin
  * library:        CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/lib/amti-yarp-devices/forcetorqueDriverExample.so
  * system version: 5
  * class name:     yarp::dev::forcetorqueDriverExample
  * base class:     yarp::dev::DeviceDriver

If this is not the case, there could be some problems in finding the plugin. In that case, just move yourself to the ``${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}/share/amti-yarp-devices` directory and launch the device from there.

Device use

To launch the forcetorqueDriverExample device, you can use the example configuration file forcetorqueDriverExample/yarprobotinterface.xml for the yarprobotinterface. To do so, launch the yarpserver, then on a terminal launch the device:

yarprobotinterface --from yarprobotinterface.xml

This should open a YARP port /ft , that you can read from the command line for example using the yarp read command:

yarp read ... /ft/analog:o