ROS Control Boilerplate

Simple simulation interface and template for setting up a hardware interface for ros_control. The idea is you take this as a starting point for creating your hardware interfaces, and it is needed because ros_control documentation is sparse. This boilerplate demonstrates:

Creating a hardware_interface for multiple joints for use with ros_control
Position Trajectory Controller
Control of 2 joints of the simple robot "RRBot" pictured below
Loading configurations with roslaunch and yaml files
Generating a random trajectory and sending it over an actionlib interface
Partial support of joint mode switching (needs to be improved)
Joint limits
Pass-through non-physics based robot simulator
Visualization in Rviz

This open source project was developed at PickNik Robotics. Need professional ROS development and consulting? Contact us at projects@picknik.ai for a free consultation.

Maintainers

Special thanks to the following maintainers of this repo:

Dave Coleman (@davetcoleman)
Andy Zelenak (@AndyZe)
John Morris (@zultron)
Robert Wilbrandt (@RobertWilbrandt)

Status:

Travis CI
Devel Job Status
AMD64 Debian Job Status

Video Demo

See YouTube for a very modest video demo.

Install

This package depends on gazebo_ros_demos for its rrbot_description package, but you must add it to your catkin workspace by source:

git clone https://github.com/ros-simulation/gazebo_ros_demos.git

Then, either install this package from source so you can develop off of it, or install from debian:

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-control-boilerplate

Run Simulation Demo

This package is setup to run the "RRBot" two joint revolute-revolute robot demo. This "template package" is located in the ros_control_boilerplate as a subfolder that you can easily rename and reuse. To run its ros_control non-physics-based simulated hardware interface, run:

roslaunch ros_control_boilerplate rrbot_simulation.launch

To visualize its published /tf coordinate transforms in Rviz run:

roslaunch ros_control_boilerplate rrbot_visualize.launch

To send a random, dummy trajectory to execute, run:

roslaunch ros_control_boilerplate rrbot_test_trajectory.launch

Customize

To test this as a simulation interface for your robot, you can quickly rename the subfolder package into the name of your robot using the following commands:

function findreplace() {
    grep -lr -e "$1" * | xargs sed -i "s/$1/$2/g" ;
}

function findreplacefilename() {
    find . -depth -name "*$1*" -exec bash -c 'for f; do base=${f##*/}; mv -- "$f" "${f%/*}/${base//'$1'/'$2'}"; done' _ {} +
}

findreplacefilename rrbot myrobot
findreplace rrbot myrobot
findreplace RRBot MyRobot
findreplace RRBOT MYROBOT

Then add the necessary code to communicate with your robot via USB/serial/ethernet/etc in the file myrobot_hw_interface.cpp.

Setting an Initial Position, Using with MoveIt!

If you need your robot to startup at a particular position in simulation, or you would like to use this funcitonality to simulate your robot with MoveIt!, see the downstream package (it depends on this package) moveit_sim_controller

Other Helper Tools

Recording to CSV

Write the commands from a trajectory controller to csv file

rosrun ros_control_boilerplate controller_to_csv SAVE_TO_FILE_PATH CONTROLLER_STATE_TOPIC TIME_TO_RECORD

Commanding from CSV

Read from csv file and execute on robot

rosrun ros_control_boilerplate csv_to_controller READ_FROM_FILE_PATH CONTROLLER_STATE_TOPIC TIME_TO_RECORD

Commanding from Keyboard

Joint-level teleop from a keyboard (TODO: remove had coded topic names)

rosrun ros_control_boilerplate keyboard_teleop

Limitations

Does not implement estops, transmissions, or other fancy new features of ros_control
Does not have any hard realtime code, this depends largely on your platform, kernel, OS, etc
Only position control is fully implemented, though some code is in place for velocity control

Contribute

Please add features, make corrections, and address the limitations above, thanks!

gbrlb/ros_control_boilerplate