I have switched focus to software at the moment, and am writing a basic user interface that will let me interact with the servo controller and the ROS packages, specifically the MoveIt! Move Group Interface/C++ API.

The interface is written in Qt using the Qt Creator IDE. As this is very ROS focused, I am building the GUI as a ROS package using catkin_make, which was tricky to set up inside Qt Creator, but worked in the end!

Currently the GUI can start a ROS node and receive current and goal position/velocity for each servo. It also enables the creation of a list of joint poses from the current robot’s state, and the ability to add them to a second list, which will act as a queue for moving through sequences of poses later on. The lists can be manipulated and also saved/loaded to CSV text files. A group of slider widgets shows the robot’s current joint positions, with added markers to show ‘target’ positions.

A number of buttons are yet not implemented, but the idea is to make this a quick and easy interface to a number of motion plans using the MoveIt! API, as I found it cumbersome trying to test with just a simple test C++ file. Hopefully this is the first step to a GUI with many features to come!

All source code is available on GitHub if you want to have a look.