TL;DR: scroll down and check the list.

Hello everyone,

Now that ROS Kinetic has been released I would like to bring your attention to the new features we have introduced to ros_control in Kinetic.

This day ros_control is being used by members of industry, academia and even space agencies. Pretty neat, huh?

We would like to thank everyone contributing to the software and the discussions, your feedback is what keeps things improving.

If you are in doubt about some features, feel free to open an issue on github and we will do our best to answer. If you have code to patch up, feel free to open a pull request and as always, we are a bit behind on documentation, so if you'd like to contribute that's a good spot to start!

New features of ros_control in Kinetic:

CombinedRobotHW adds the feature of loading RobotHW classes as plugins, platform-specific ros_control RobotHW implementations can now be shipped along with the platform and there's no need to customize the RobotHW every time new hardware is added. Minimizing integration efforts for the better.
Examples:

Mobile base that can have one arm or 2 arms.
Arm that can have several fancy end effectors.
For more see: https://github.com/ros-controls/ros_control/pull/231

joint_trajectory_controller now publishes feedback on the action interface.
For more see: https://github.com/ros-controls/ros_controllers/issues/173
The PID class in control_toolbox supports:

Negative values through the dynamic_reconfigure interface: https://github.com/ros-controls/control_toolbox/pull/50
When configured, they publish their state information on a topic of type https://github.com/ros-controls/control_msgs/blob/indigo-devel/control_msgs/msg/PidState.msg
Anti-windup: https://github.com/ros-controls/control_toolbox/pull/38

Cheers,

Bence