bullet physics soft body robotic grasping
Channel: Lucas Walter
Date: 2017-10-04

Rigid body grasping on soft body pressurized sphere.  The sphere is regenerated with different pressures and later different surface tesselations.

roslaunch bullet_server bullet_server.launch use_sim_clock:=true rigid_only:=false
roslaunch bullet_server grasp.launch
rosrun bullet_server icosphere.py __ns:=bullet_server _pressure:=500 _mass:=1.5 _levels:=3

It would be good to try a volume sphere as well, or turn it into an ellipsoid or make other shapes.

Perhaps the friction could be cranked up so the squishier spheres wouldn't slip out.  Maybe finger tips would help too.

Picking up a piece of simulated cloth would be interesting, and probably difficult.

bullet_server is using about 60% of a cpu with about 3000Hz internal update rate, that could probably be reduced (though soft body penetrations seem to get more common then), and the real time factor increased for faster simulation.

I'm using an rviz branch that allows light sources, the bullet_server.launch that launches rviz will likely fail elsewhere (so just start a new one and subscribe a Marker to visualization_marker_array).