This repository contains packages for an underwater vehicle-manipulator system consisting of a Seabotix vLBV300 underwater vehicle and a Reach Alpha arm.

This repository requires Project Dave.

See my install scripts here or install according to the instructions on the Project Dave wiki.

After building/installing Project Dave, clone this repository into your catkin workspace.

Then rebuild the catkin workspace and source devel/setup.bash as usual.

Make sure that all the Python files in the seabotix_alpha/seabotix_alpha_description/scripts are given permission to be executable by running:

chmod +x seabotix_alpha/seabotix_alpha_description/scripts/*.py

• roslaunch seabotix_alpha_description valve_manipulation_demo.launch - launches the whole system in an underwater environment

• roslaunch seabotix_alpha_description seabotix_vehicle.launch - launches the Seabotix vehicle only in an underwater environment

• roslaunch alpha_description alpha_arm.launch - launches the Reach 5 arm only in an underwater environment

• roslaunch seabotix_alpha_moveit_config demo.launch - launches the MoveIt! Rviz interface to generate plans for the vehicle + arm and execute on a dummy robot.

• roslaunch seabotix_alpha_description moveit_demo.launch + roslaunch seabotix_alpha_moveit_config moveit_planning_execution.launch - launches the whole system with controllers compatible with Moveit + the MoveIt! Rviz interface to generate plans. This will let you generate plans in MoveIt! and execute on the simulated robot in Gazebo.

• roslaunch seabotix_alpha_description uvms_world.launch + rosrun seabotix_alpha_description turbulence_experiment.py - launches the Gazebo environment with the Seabotix vehicle and Alpha arm + controllers for position/joint angle control. The second script adds oscillatory currents to test its stationkeeping ability. Results are logged in /home/developer/uuv_ws/experiment_logs/<timestamp>.

• rosrun seabotix_alpha_description currents.py - causes currents in the environment based on vehicle pose. Modify the parameters in this script to set different current fields.

• rosrun seabotix_alpha_description currents_reset.py - sets the currents back to 0.

The simulator precomputes the Jacobian that maps thruster output to vehicle motion. This thruster allocation matrix will need to be updated if the vehicle mass/hydrodynamic parameters are changed. To do so, run the launch files with the reset_tam flag set to true:

roslaunch seabotix_alpha_description valve_manipulation_demo.launch reset_tam:=true