Arm calibration should be optional during PR2 bringup (ros ticket #5202)

[ahendrix]

Arm calibration is extremely annoying if the robot is close to objects/people/walls. For in-home use, I changed this into a three-step process in which you bring up the robot without calibrating the arms, move the robot somewhere safe, and then recalibrate the whole robot including the arms. Everyone I've shown it to has said it should be available on all robots, so here it is.

The patch to pr2_bringup is attached.

In the patch, pr2.launch calls pr2_calibrate.py with the --do-not-move-arms param to start the robot without calibrating the arms. (If the arms were previously calibrated, their controllers are started anyway.) Then, pr2_recalibrate_arms.launch calls pr2_calibrate.py with --recalibrate-arms to recalibrate the entire robot including the arms (and forces the arm controllers to start up.) I took this slightly messy approach because I had to make it work from the App Chooser on a tablet.

I would suggest making --do-not-move-arms an option for "robot start". If someone explicitly starts the robot without calibrating the arms, they should be responsible for recalibrating the robot once it's in an open space.

For the tablet, I think that --do-not-move-arms should be the default when connecting to a robot and there should be an app for recalibrating the robot.

trac data:

• Owner: ahendrix
• Reporter: pantofaru
• Reported at: Fri Jun 29 11:41:32 2012
• URL: https://code.ros.org/trac/wg-ros-pkg/ticket/5202