tiago_telepresence_controllers

Joint controllers for telepresence applications on TIAGo and TIAGo++.

Dependencies

This project depends on the ros_tcp_endpoint package.

Running in simulation

We recommend rocker and a NVIDIA GPU. It is assumed that you have cloned this repository inside your current working directory (along with ros_tcp_endpoint).

Since the TIAGo++ image also contains packages for the single-arm TIAGo, we recommend pulling the former:

rocker --port 10000:10000 --port 5005:5005 \
       --nvidia --x11 --privileged \
       --volume $PWD/tiago_telepresence_controllers:/tiago_dual_public_ws/src/tiago_telepresence_controllers \
       --volume $PWD/ROS-TCP-Endpoint:/tiago_dual_public_ws/src/ROS-TCP-Endpoint \
       -- palroboticssl/tiago_dual_tutorials:noetic

If you wish to preserve the container, which is most useful for developing, the --nocleanup option must be added to the rocker command. However, the second run won't be successful if temporary files are not reused. To achieve that, they need to be persisted in a non-temporary directory and shared with the container.

The invocation would change to:

mkdir -p $HOME/.tmp-tiago && TMPDIR=$HOME/.tmp-tiago \
rocker --nocleanup \
       --port 10000:10000 --port 5005:5005 \
       --nvidia --x11 --privileged \
       --env TMPDIR=/tmp-tiago \
       --volume $PWD/tiago_telepresence_controllers:/tiago_dual_public_ws/src/tiago_telepresence_controllers \
       --volume $PWD/ROS-TCP-Endpoint:/tiago_dual_public_ws/src/ROS-TCP-Endpoint \
       --volume $HOME/.tmp-tiago:/tmp-tiago \
       -- palroboticssl/tiago_dual_tutorials:noetic

To build the package: catkin build tiago_spnav_telepresence.

For single-arm TIAGo

roslaunch tiago_spnav_telepresence tiago_gazebo.launch

For dual-arm TIAGo++

roslaunch tiago_spnav_telepresence tiago_dual_gazebo.launch

Running on the real robot

Upload the project to your active workspace and build it using the deploy.py script (but without deploying it yet):

rosrun pal_deploy deploy.py -u pal -p tiago_telepresence_controllers $(hostname)

Press n when asked to rsync, then copy the command displayed at the bottom, replace pal with root, and run it. Make sure to reboot the robot at least once in order to let ROS find the plugin library at the next start.

For single-arm TIAGo

After you ssh into the robot:

roslaunch tiago_telepresence_controllers tiago_real.launch

For dual-arm TIAGo++

After you ssh into the robot:

roslaunch tiago_telepresence_controllers tiago_dual_real.launch

Citation

If you found this project useful, please consider citing the following work:

Łukawski, B., et al, "Towards the development of telepresence applications with TIAGo and TIAGo++ using a virtual reality headset," in IEEE Int. Conf. on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC), 2025.

@inproceedings{lukawski2025icarsc,
    author={Łukawski, Bartek and Montesino, Ignacio and Oña, Edwin Daniel and Victores, Juan G. and Balaguer, Carlos and Jardón, Alberto},
    title={{Towards the development of telepresence applications with TIAGo and TIAGo++ using a virtual reality headset}},
    booktitle={Int. Conf. on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC)},
    year={2025},
    organization={IEEE},
}