The VF3 manipulator is a low-cost (<£300) 7 DoF gripper intended for dextrous manipulation tasks. It incorporates variable friction finger-tips to perform within-hand manipulation. Instructions on how to build a VF3 Manipulator can be found in the CAD directory. ROS2_PACKAGES contains the ros2 middleware written for this project, and FRICTION_CONTROL contains a Platform.io project implementing the friction change actuation via FreeRTOS firmware on a microcontroller (tested on an ESP32).
Once constructed, the VF3 Manipulator may be teleoperated using the below control scheme:
The packages for this project have been tested in ROS2 Humble. Clone the ROS2_PACKAGES folder to your ROS2 workspace's src folder, and use colcon build. Then, after doing source install/setup.bash, ros2 launch vf3_manipulator_bringup demo.launch.py with the Dynamixel controller connected to the /dev/ttyUSB0 port and the ESP32 connected to the /dev/ttyUSB1 port. This should return the manipulator to its home position.