Development of the low-level software architecture for the Sherpa robot arm

The SHERPA project aims to improve rescuing activities in alpine environments by using smart collaboration between humans and robots. Within the SHERPA work, a seven degrees of freedom robotic arm has been developed. The robotic arm is mounted on a ground rover and it needs to dock and undock the drones that need to swap their battery packs. In this BSc project, a low-level software interface has been developed that is able to drive the arm from ROS. A ROS software node is presented that can drive the motors in the arm over a CAN bus. The ROS software node supports driving motors on multiple CAN buses, can drive a differential pair of motors as two separate joints and is built in way that makes it relatively easy to add support formore types of CAN devices. A Graphical User Interface is provided to test the ROS software node.