How to use inverse kinematics solver for the Baxter robot in Simulink

One of our laboratories recently ordered some Baxter robots from Rethink Robotics and we are in the process of creating simple simulation scenarios in Simulink for students to get used to ROS (Robot Operating System) within a familiar environment. By using the ">>rosmsg list" We know that the Robotics System Toolbox in MATLAB supports Baxter Core Messages; however, while most of these are available in the Simulink ROS Blank Message block, the following are not:

baxter_core_msgs/SolvePositionIKRequest

baxter_core_msgs/SolvePositionIKResponse

These are the message types used to request and obtain information, respectively, from the Baxter built-in inverse kinematics solver. Does anyone have experience getting this to work in Simulink or does it have to be done strictly through MATLAB?

Thank you for your help!

[Saurabh Gupta]

Quick observation: I don't see these message types even in ROS docs.

http://docs.ros.org/hydro/api/baxter_core_msgs/html/index-msg.html

[Francisco Franquiz]

(@ Saurabh Gupta) They are listed under service types in the link you sent; see the very last entry.

[Arun Prasanth Soungyan Gokul]

Hi Francisco, Mathworks introduced ROS Service Blocks in Simulink for the Matlab version 2018b. So, from this block, we can request inverse kinematics and retrieve the response.