[ros-users] using ROS with a new 7-DOF arm hardware

[Stuart Glaser]

Hi Patrick,

I'll try to answer some of your questions about writing a controller
for your robot and simulating it in Gazebo.

You should create a controller that provides a
pr2_controllers_msgs/JointTrajectory [1] action server, similar to the
joint_trajectory_action.  This action is the interface that the motion
planning stacks use to command the controller.

Don't use the joint_trajectory_action itself.  It only exists to
support older (deprecated) controllers that didn't provide the action
interface themselves.  Instead, you should use the
JointTrajectoryActionController as the best example of what to write.

You also asked about how to simulate your robot using Gazebo.  AFAIK,
you have three choices:

1. Write a Gazebo plugin that mimics your robot's interface.  The
Gazebo plugin communicates to Gazebo (I think by writing to Gazebo
interface classes that it creates; see the Gazebo documentation), and
it also provides the ROS topics, services, and actions that the rest
of your software expects.  If your joint trajectory action is
communicating with the hard realtime system over ROS, then you can
just implement that interface and keep the rest of your code the same.

2. Use the pr2_mechanism infrastructure in Gazebo, but not for your
regular robot.  In this case, you would write PR2 controllers (or use
the existing JointTrajectoryActionController) for when your robot runs
in simulation, which have the same ROS interface as the controllers
for your robot.

3. Use the pr2_mechanism infrastructure in Gazebo and on your own
robot.  Though pr2_mechanism was intended to run only on a PR2, other
groups have had success with porting it to other robots [2].

Those are your three options.  None of them stands out as the best
option, so you will probably be fine no matter which you choose.

[1] http://www.ros.org/doc/api/pr2_controllers_msgs/html/msg/JointTrajectoryGoal.html
[2] http://answers.ros.org/question/158/build-a-controller-for-an-arm-no-pr2
[3] http://www.ros.org/wiki/pr2_mechanism_model

Cheers,
-Stu


On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 9:47 AM, Patrick Beeson <beeson.p at gmail.com> wrote:
> I now found out a bit more.  I now realize that by setting the
> commanded_effort_ of a JointState is the way commands are sent (not via
> messages or other).   I also see that  Gazebo is has a plugin to
> replicate the controller_manager, that uses the URDF description to set
> up a robot model and simulation joint motions.  So, at the VERY least,
> if I want to use Gazebo, I'll need to make sure that I load a
> pr2_mechansim_model of the Robot that is consistent with the model used
> by Gazebo.
> Does this sound correct?
>
>
> to have it's own ros_controller_manager that does the same for Gazebo.
> So, my intuition is that if I write
>
>
> On 06/14/2011 10:53 AM, Patrick Beeson wrote:
>> Great.  I look froward to trying this out once it's released.
>>
>> One or two quick questions that are not at all clear.   Will (in the
>> new tool chain) my custom JointTrajectoryAction controller also need
>> to be a pr2_controller in order to use my URDF model with Gazebo?  I
>> was going to make a joint_trajectory_action_node that communicated
>> directly with my hard in soft real-time to start.   This wasn't going
>> to be a pr2_controller at all.   But I will want to be able to use the
>> urdf model to control the arm in Gazebo.   My understanding is that
>> right now, somewhere, something allows controllers to run in
>> simulation instead of on the ethercat hardware.  I can't seem to find
>> a good example that shows where exactly the line in drawn between sim
>> and real, but it looks like the default Gazebo pr2 sim AND the pr2 arm
>> hardware  both use
>> robot_mechanism_controllers/src/joint_trajectory_action_controller.cpp.
>> Examining that controller, I find it VERY difficult to understand how
>> the low-level joint commands are being set (they seem to be copied
>> into a RealTimeBox that is never intialized, so I don't know where
>> they go from there).    So is the sim joint communication happening
>> below this?  Do I need to do something special to talk to simulated
>> joints in Gazebo versus on my hardware?  Another way of asking, if I
>> write a joint_trajectory_action_controller to talk to my specific
>> hardware, will I need to write another to talk to Gazebo?   And Do
>> these need to be pr2_controllers?
>>
>>
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-- 
Stuart Glaser
sglaser -at- willowgarage -dot- com
www.willowgarage.com