Vacuum gripper doesn't work most of the time

[Former user]

We are struggling to make the vacuum gripper work. Are there any specific ways to grasp a part because it is really annoying. We can see that gripper really touches the part, we tried different heights, different point of contacts with the part but it doesn't work most of the time. If we run the same setup for twice for example, on one run it can work and on the other it just won't work.

[Michael Sprague]

What Real Time Factor is displayed in your Gazebo client for the simulation? I have two systems running the GEAR software. The first has Real Time Factor of around 0.90 most of the time (90%) and the vacuum gripper behaves pretty much as expected. However the other system runs at 0.15 or so and the vacuum gripper does not ever attach to a part on that setup, using the same code. So I suspect if you are on a slower computer, there is something about the vacuum gripper simulation which is causing it to behave poorly.

[Brian Gerkey]

Thanks for the tip. We'll look into the RTF and also consider other options for improving reliability.

[Furkan Davulcu]

Yes, we have the situation just like Michael described. Vacuum gripper has a very, very inconsistent behaviour on different hardwares. Thank you.

[Deanna Hood]

We've confirmed that the performance of the vacuum gripper depends on the realtime factor as suggested by @msprague.

We have some changes to the gripper lined up that will allow it to work with any realtime factor. Since we don't want to change the behaviour of the gripper while submissions for qualification task 1 are open, we will release these changes after the qual1 submissions close.

If you are unable to participate in the first qualification task, you will still be able to qualify for the competition through the remaining qualification tasks.

[Deanna Hood]

We believe that this issue has been addressed in the latest ARIAC release. If you find that updating the ARIAC software does not solve this issue for you, please feel free to re-open this.