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

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

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file

Changelog for package ros_control_boilerplate

0.4.2 (2021-02-23)

• Revert "Replaced boost with std shared_ptr" This reverts commit d3030f4d383895895931a9ca400497cfb72acdd9. This change broke the api, backporting it was an oversight.
• Add clang-format and catkin_lint checks to CI Backported from 638d8acb242813d298d6953d62ba36804b479242
• CMakeLists reformatting to better match catkin_lint expectations Unfortunately we will probably not be able to get catkin_lint to run warning-free, as it (correctly) detects that all rrbot_control launch files have some extra run dependencies we don't require for building the base package. Backported from 0db7327c2f14d9a0d3591adf24a82526c6053a37
• Replaced boost with std shared_ptr Backported from 9b46eaf115c16de9e453d59085b75aa9eebc3818
• Make NodeHandle a const reference The classes already make a copy of the NodeHandle so this change only make the interface more strict. It should not affect the external behavior of this class. Backported from 115b9624e60c38f3d5359ab186f00e9b0ae24be3
• Whitespace cleanup Backported from aea83fc71f9a05a24382b673144cc4045b7d8a1b
• test_trajectory: Read joints list from trajectory controller params If the [hardware_interface/joints]{.title-ref} list contains some joints configured in a trajectory controller, the [test_trajectory]{.title-ref} program exits with an error: [ERROR]: Joints on incoming goal don't match the controller joints. [ INFO]: Action finished: REJECTED [ INFO]: TestTrajectory Finished [ INFO]: Shutting down. The correct list of joints for the trajectory controller can be found in the [<trajectory_controller_name>/joints]{.title-ref} parameter. Since the [<trajectory_controller_name>/follow_joint_trajectory]{.title-ref} parameter name is already being passed in, this patch simply shortens that to [<trajectory_controller_name>]{.title-ref}, and uses it to construct both topic names. Now the trajectory is generated for the correct number of joints. Backported from 33daf81d2278a193ab8b5c75e1aaf8c5667ac109
• Add Robert as maintainer to repo Backported from dba8338720bc3b0b2d1ed2c125953ed6d13ae3aa
• Acknowledge maintainers of this repo in README Backported from 5f5fca18cd987e9f6a601ce393bfd47f97758aac
• Generalize GenericHWControlLoop to all types of RobotHW (#38) Backported from 8353dd3f3e4df30bf86269f695769e788227b8ed
• Update README.md Backported from 4e08588ba61e88893a1a6ab7f800144f22cb38a3
• Fix build badges in README (#37) Backported from 66fd47b00b499f4e677fb47ecf8bd848b877f8e0 There doesn't seem to be any kinetic release for debian, so it is left out Backported from 66fd47b00b499f4e677fb47ecf8bd848b877f8e0
• Update .travis.yml to use moveit_ci (#36) Backported from 8b50f2142a244a941b576538cf0f44879d5997d9
• Increase num AsyncSpinners where control loops are instantiated Backported from b6a06c856c65698340cb5251531ec0e5ee94aabc
• Merge pull request #20 from ipa-mdl/fix-loop-deadlock refactor GenericHWControlLoop to a sleep-based loop
• Merge pull request #19 from PaulBouchier/kinetic-devel change sim_control_mode to 0 (position) so demo works
• Merge pull request #21 from MohmadAyman/fix_typo fixed a typo in readme
• fixed a typo in readme
• refactor GenericHWControlLoop to a sleep-based loop using ros:Timer might lead to deadlocks
• initialize desired_update_period_ (renamed from desired_update_freq_)
• Revert "Depend on Eigen3" This reverts commit 608cc2fd64739ee56c3fbd5a0ae9d5d26b5684d0.
• change sim_control_mode to 0 (position) so demo works
• Merge pull request #16 from lucasw/xml-version xml version tags for all launch files.
• xml version tags for all launch files.
• Merge pull request #15 from enricotoi/kinetic-devel Fixed a typo in the README.md
• Fixed a typo in the README.md rrbot_simulaton.launch -> rrbot_simulation.launch
• Update README.md
• Contributors: AndyZe, Dave Coleman, Jafar Abdi, John Morris, Lucas Walter, Mathias Lüdtke, Paul Bouchier, Ramon Wijnands, Robert Wilbrandt, RobertWilbrandt, Tim Übelhör, enrico toivinen, mohmad ayman

0.4.1 (2017-06-20)

• Changed boost::shared_ptr to typedef for Lunar support
• Implemented simulated velocity control
• Contributors: Dave Coleman

0.4.0 (2016-06-29)

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