robot-jaka-mini — JAKA Mini Robonix deployment

Robonix deployment for the fixed-base JAKA Mini 6-DOF arm with a TG-9801 adaptive gripper (end RS485). The arm is driven by the primitive-jaka-mini-arm-rbnx package over TCP to the controller (jkrc SDK).

Hardware & platform

Packages

The manifest references all packages by url: — rbnx boot fetches them into rbnx-boot/cache/ (catalog-resolvable for the package site):

The sibling checkouts (../primitive-*-rbnx, ../skill-jaka-rbnx) remain the development copies; build.sh builds them so machine-local paths (e.g. soma's codegen overlay) keep working.

Pick skill (camera-driven grasp)

jaka_pick locates a named object and grasps it: resolve camera/rgb → grab a frame → detect → a calibrated 2D hand-eye homography maps the bbox centre to arm base_link XY → grasp at (x, y, desktop_height) with a vertical-down orientation. It reuses the same grasp segment as grab.

Two detection backends (detect_scheme in the skill config):

• yolo (deploy default): in-process yolo11-obb — the fruit model (carrot/potato/tomato) reused from the agilex deploy at robot-agilex-robonix/host-services/yolo/weights/best.pt (set yolo_model_path; the skill interpreter has CUDA torch + ultralytics). Two-frame consistency filters flicker; Chinese phrasing maps to class names via yolo_class_aliases (胡萝卜→carrot …); the OBB rotation aligns the gripper yaw to the object's long edge (rz = grasp_yaw_offset_deg - yaw, default -90 = AIIT's tuned JAKA value — adjust by ±90 if the fingers land off-axis).
• vlm: open-vocabulary multimodal detection (pixel bbox, no rotation → fixed grasp_rpy).

Calibration is required and on-site. pick is unavailable until you set, in robonix_manifest.yaml's skill: - name: jaka config block: - homography_matrix — 3×3 pixel→base_link, calibrated at 1280×720 (same kind of matrix as agilex's grasp_pose); - the scheme's detector: yolo_model_path (existing weights file) or vlm_base_url / vlm_api_key / vlm_model (multimodal endpoint); - desktop_height — the table height in base_link (grasp z).

Until then pick returns a clear error; grab / release are unaffected.

URDF

urdf/robot.urdf is the JAKA app export of the real JAKA Mini (with meshes/). It is consumed by Soma (urdf.path in soma.yaml), which serves the raw XML to robot_description via get_urdf.

The export was post-processed for this deployment: the 6 arm joints were renamed link_002_joint..link_007_joint → joint_1..joint_6 so robot_state_publisher matches the joint_states names published by the jaka_arm provider. If the URDF is re-exported from the JAKA app, re-apply this rename (see the note in soma.yaml). The two gripper finger joints (link_008_joint/link_009_joint) are kept as exported; the provider publishes a single gripper_joint value.

Prerequisites

• Robonix tooling: make install from a cloned syswonder/robonix checkout, then rbnx setup <robonix source dir>.
• sudo apt install ros-humble-rclpy ros-humble-rmw-zenoh-cpp
• Primitive package built: rbnx build -p ../primitive-jaka-rbnx (dev sibling checkout; first bash build.sh also fetches the url-based packages into rbnx-boot/cache/)

Build

bash build.sh

build.sh is the canonical entry: it prepares the deploy venv, then builds ../primitive-jaka-rbnx, ../primitive-orbbec-camera-rbnx, ../skill-jaka-rbnx, and both manifests. robot_description is fetched from the package catalog into rbnx-boot/cache/ at boot.

Camera build note (native): the Orbbec driver (../primitive-orbbec-camera-rbnx) colcon-builds the vendored OrbbecSDK_ROS2, which needs ROS 2 C++ deps (rclcpp, image_transport, cv_bridge, camera_info_manager, tf2_ros, …) absent from this Jetson's minimal /opt/ros/humble. Install them once per machine (needs sudo):

bash ../primitive-orbbec-camera-rbnx/scripts/install_deps.sh

The camera build.sh checks for these and fails fast with this pointer if they're missing. The arm-only stack builds fine without them (the camera primitive is only needed for pick).

Boot

# read-only (motion_enabled: false): feedback streams, no motion
bash start.sh

# after estop verification and single-joint tests, enable motion in
# robonix_manifest.yaml: jaka_arm.config.motion_enabled: true

Motion commands stay rejected while motion_enabled: false (safety gate, see ../primitive-jaka-rbnx/config.spec).

Acceptance record

Fill in the robot revision, Robonix commit (git -C <robonix> rev-parse HEAD) and measured gripper open reading here after acceptance.