F.A.Q.

MIDCA_1.4 Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get started with MIDCA? Where do I begin?

See the Quick Start section here.

Where can I find more information about MIDCA?

A number of student-initiated workshops have been held on MIDCA. The following URL contains pointers to the web sites for these events and includes slides, recorded oral presentations and workshop proceedings. http://www.midca-arch.org/workshops See the References section of this manual for further reading. Additionally, the link below contains pointers to many publications pertaining to MIDCA. http://www.wright.edu/~michael.cox/colab2/publications_copy_chronological.html

I modified the source code but when I run MIDCA it's not detecting the changes.

The way MIDCA is currently set up is that you need to run python setup.py install to update any changes you've made to the code. This is because when MIDCA is run, it's using the version stored in python's Lib/site-packages. This is different than where the source code is that you're likely editing. When you run the command python setup.py install one of the things it does is copy the source code from where you are editing it to the Lib/site-packages directory of your python installation. MIDCA is currently setup to be run in this way.

Using MIDCA with ROS and the Baxter robot

How to install ROS?

Follow the instructions from http://sdk.rethinkrobotics.com/wiki/Baxter_Setup

Which ROS distribution should I install?

Find your linux distribution and choose a compatible ROS for your linux distribution. for example, the compatible ROS for Trusty is indigo. If you chose Hydro for Trusty, you will have to install ROS from source and you need to solve the issue of dependencies.

How to find the linux distribution?

lsb_release -a

How to create a ROS service?

ROS services are defined by srv files which specifies contains a request message and a response message. Follow this link to create a ROS service: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/CreatingPackage

example: roscreate-pkg baxter_cog std_msgs rospy roscpp

You need to adjust your CMakeLists.txt file; you have to uncomment rosbuild_genmsg() and rosbuild_gensrv()

How to install Opencv?

http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/introduction/linux_install/linux_install.html#linux-installation http://opencv.org/

How to install Moveit?

Followed instructions from https://github.com/RethinkRobotics/sdk-docs/wiki/MoveIt-Tutorial Baxter using moveit was detecting a collision between its hand camera and gripper base, as well as [right/left]_hand_range and gripper_base, gripper and gripper base. Added exceptions to ignore those to baxter_ws/src/moveit_robots/baxter/baxter_moveit_config/config/baxter.srdf

How to install ORK?

followed instructions from http://wg-perception.github.io/object_recognition_core/install.html#install