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Overview

This package contains an interface to the tactile sensors used in our Dexterous Hand. The tactile sensors are - for the time being - simple pressure sensors, one on each finger tip, but they will evolve to more complex tactile sensors.

To ensure the same versatile use as the sr_hand package, the sr_tactile_sensors come in three flavours: dummy sensors, simulated sensors and real sensors.

• The dummy sensors are useful to check the main steps of your algorithm, they're very lightweight and don't do much except return a pressure value for each sensors. The output value of those dummy sensors is just computed from the joint positions of the finger joints.

• The simulated sensors are bumper sensors added to the Gazebo model of the Dexterous Hand. If you want more info on how to use the tactile sensors Gazebo interface, go to this tutorial.

• The real sensor interface is accessing the information published by the tactile sensors integrated in our hardware. For more information, have a look at this tutorial.

There's a good example on how to use the data coming from the tactile sensors in the Fancy Touch Demo example

ROS API

Published Topics

When you start the interface, two topics per sensors will be published (10 topics in all). Each sensor publishes a pressure value. Each of the topic is publishing a std_msgs/float64 value.

Here is a list of the published topics:

• /sr_tactile/touch/ff

• /sr_tactile/touch/mf

• /sr_tactile/touch/rf

• /sr_tactile/touch/lf

• /sr_tactile/touch/th

Parameters

A parameter file containing the sensor names to use is loaded into the parameter server. By default it's in sr_tactile_sensors/param/sensor_names.yaml. This file contains:

• display_names: the names which will be used in the published topics (e.g. "ff")

• sensor_touch_names: the names under which the touch sensors are available in the robot (e.g. FF_Touch).

Compiling

By default, when you run rosmake sr_tactile_sensors, the tactiles are compiled as a set of dummy sensors.

To compile the interface to the real tactile sensors, run: REAL_HAND=1 rosmake sr_tactile_sensors.

If you want to compile the Gazebo tactile sensors: GAZEBO=1 rosmake sr_tactile_sensors.