SOFA and Raspberry pi commnication

[naimhamade]

hello everyone
i am working on the control of soft robot using sofa to do the inverse kinematics .

i have already implemented my model and simulations on sofa, using read-state the model gets desired positions and exports the needed actuator pressure(its pneumatically actuated like the pneunets tutorial).

and i have implemented a raspberry pi based controller for the real pneumatic robot, with micro pumps and valves and such , the only needed input is the pressure at each actuator .

i would like to establish the communication between the two ,instead of me running the simulation each time and applying it on the raspberry pi code .

i know its feasible , i just don't know where to start , has anyone done this before .
thank you

[hugtalbot]

Hi @naimhamade

a communication plugin has been implemented some years ago. It could maybe answer your need:
https://github.com/sofa-framework/Communication

Let us know whether it suits your needs.
Maybe @ErwanDouaille or @damienmarchal could provide some more details.
Best

[damienmarchal]

Hi @naimhamade

There are a lot of way to have Sofa and Raspberry Pi

The easiest is to use well esthablished communication libraries like:

• zeromq (the one we prefer at Defrost and easiest to setup).
• ROS or ROS2

The general approach consist to do:

• on the sofa side you write a Controller in python.
  Into this controller at each simulation step you dump the actuator's value into a communication channel (zmq or ROS). I can describe more that part if needed.

• on the raspberry pi side you use the zmq or ros libraryes (their c++ or python version depending in which language you are writing your physical layer).

Links:

• zeromq: https://zeromq.org/
• sofaros: https://github.com/SofaDefrost/SoftRobots/tree/master/docs/sofapython3/examples/sofaros

[hugtalbot]

let us know if this helped @naimhamade