Open Robotics Automation Virtual Environment

In cooperation with our partners we investigated several tools that may be used in the HYFLAM project. The first big part is the Open Robotics Automation Virtual Environment (OpenRAVE). To experiment without unnecessary risk it would be useful to have a simulation of the movement of the arm and the environment. To do so we take a closer look at OpenRAVE, a simulation and analysis tool created by Rosen Diankov to develop algorithms for motion planning. It offers a large number of interfaces to some scripting languages like Matlab or Python. OpenRAVE itself is implemented in C++ and has an architecture that provides plugins. There are already plugins for some physics-engines like ODE and Bullet but it is possible to implement the basic physics engine interface with the help of any other physic-engine.
Some other interesting feature are visualization using 3D coins, the inverse kinematics solver called IKFast and some trajectory-generators. IKFast has the ability to calculate the inverse kinematic matrices of any complex kinematics chain. In our case this is quite interesting because the position of the TCP is in the hand and is determined by the arm and the wrist which belongs to the hand. Of course there are no prebuilt kinematics equations exactly for this combination.
Further more, OpenRAVE is still an active project working under a GNU Lesser General Public License. There are a lot of already given models including the Mitsubishi PA10 and the C6M dexterous hand used in HYFLAM. For the control of the real joints there are some software projects with a connection to the ROS framework. Even a grasp-planer named Opengrasp exists.