Document the different versions of the meshes for Sawyer about sawyer_robot HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi @fumin. I have abstracted most of this away from the SDK customer to simply "just work" with their robot, regardless of its hardware model. That allows this package to be a "one-package-fits-all-sawyers" solution. However, I am happy to explain the method to this madness. This repo actually contains four versions of meshes for the Sawyer robot, according to the different stages of production for the Sawyer robot:

• ft = Field test. These models only exist at Rethink HQ. You can safely ignore all meshes here
• pv = Product Version. This is the product run of Sawyer.
• mp1 and mp3 = Mass production versions. As new tooling comes about, slight changes are made to some of the shells of Sawyer and their meshes. The kinematic impacts are minimal and reflected in the URDF. There are also mp2 and mp4 models, but mp2 uses the same meshes as mp1, and mp4 uses the same meshes as mp3.

You will find that each higher robot model "overlays" the previous robot model meshes, with some updates. For instance, the mp3 robot uses updated l0 and l1 meshes itself, as well as l6 meshes from mp1, and then every other mesh from pv. This is always specified by your real robot's URDF:
$ rosparam get -p /robot_description | tail -n +2 > your_sawyer.urdf

Alternatively, you can use the generic Sawyer urdf (an mp3 model) that we've supplied in this repository:
https://github.com/RethinkRobotics/sawyer_robot/blob/master/sawyer_description/urdf/sawyer.urdf

A whole bunch of abstraction here, but I hope this clears things up a bit. The gist is that these robot models shouldn't matter to the end user, as the robot will function the same regardless of the model you have. And you'll need to grab a few meshes from each folder according to your robot's model and URDF. If you're curious, robot model can be queried from the parameter server too:

$ rosparam get /manifest/robot_model
mp2

from sawyer_robot.

Hi Ian

Thanks for this wonderful explanation, we have a much clearer picture of the robot models contained in this repo now.
Moreover, I believe the whole community would benefit a lot if this information is included say in the README.
That said, since we are able to go forward with this information, I would be closing this issue for now.
Thanks again for your input.

from sawyer_robot.