Week 10: Initialized Repo, started custom scene, gathered documentation

[jshapiro314]

@senior-design-rs

Spent past weeks on researching open rave. A large part of the time was spent installing and figuring out initial setup. I gathered a list of urls that have been helpful in getting started and understanding the simulator since documentation and tutorials are scarce. I then attempted to create my own scene that I can use to test grasping with a robot and certain objects. Currently the scene consists of a table and the PR2 robot, though things need to be scaled and moved around.

My goal for this upcoming demo was to have the PR2 pick up an object using the built in grasping algorithm in my custom scene. After exploring this over the weekend, I am not sure how to proceed. Each small bit of code leads me down a rabbit hole of poor documentation, and some of the sample code is giving cryptic errors that don't have any solutions. I am now potentially exploring not using OpenRAVE, but am concerned with how much time I've wasted, and don't want to spend more time learning a brand new system.

Most recently, I've been able to get a puma robot to figure out a grasp position for a random block. This is located in test.py, and is the culmination of a lot of documentation reading, figuring out how the libraries work and how to import and modify robots. For some reason, I cannot get this code to work for the PR2 robot, so that is my next challenge. This code is in the following commit: acaac08

There has only been a handful of commits because I was doing everything local, and I hadn't pushed to GitHub. From now on I will be properly using git.