Baxter Setup

1. Create the Workspace

First, create a meaningful ROS workspace.
Make sure the name reflects the project’s purpose.

mkdir -p ~/ros_baxter_ws/src

It is recommended to keep “ros” in the name, but make the rest meaningful.

Move into the workspace source folder:

cd ~/ros_baxter_ws/src

Initialise the workspace using wstool:

wstool init .

This may take approximately 1 minute, depending on system performance.

Download the Baxter SDK repositories:

wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RethinkRobotics/baxter/master/baxter_sdk.rosinstall

After merging, you should see the following packages:

From inside the src folder, run:

wstool update (approx 1 minute)

Then source the project

source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash

You will run into errors (depending on OS version)

ls /opt/ros/noetic

List the contents to confirm everything downloaded correctly:

ls

You should now see all Baxter-related folders inside the workspace.

You may encounter a code error, depending on the Python version. So in baxter_interface (python script), you will see this:

except OSError, e;

This needs to be:

except OSEerror as e:

Within baxter_ws, you will need to set both the host and user ID. This needs to be done by the staff.

Once started, you can start with topics and programming Baxter

You MUST source and build

catkin_make

After home making is done, it is now time to launch and enable Baxter.

Must run first:

rosrun baxter.sh

Then we can start by entering the ws.

ros_baxter_ws

and then

rosrun baxter_tools enable_robot.py -e

Enables baxter

rosrun baxter_tools enable_robot.py -d

Disables baxter

To see preloaded topics (what you installed earlier)

rostopic list

Will show all active topics

To launch topics:

rostopic pub (insert topic)

Next up, we will look at controlling Baxter through scripts.