[ros-users] Joint controller manager

[Adolfo Rodríguez Tsouroukdissian]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Jonathan Bohren
<jonathan.bohren at gmail.com>wrote:

> Adolpho,
>
>
Hey Jonathan,

I'm putting orocos-users back on the sender list so they don't miss updates
of the thread.


> This is great stuff!
>
> I've also been working on an orocos-based controller manager that has a
> similar interface to the ROS PR2 controller manager. The system I put
> together a year ago is really rough around the edges and could be designed
> much better, though. I was already planning on jumping into a rewrite and
> it'd be great to brainstorm ideas and put together something that can be
> used by the community.
>

Great news!, I'm curious about your experience and results.

>
> One thing that I think the ros-orocos integration needs is better support
> for actionlib for calling orocos operations over ROS.
>

Some time ago there was a discussion on the orocos list about exposing
services and actions. What I remember from it was that the mapping between
the ROS and Orocos worlds was not as straightforward as that between topics
and ports.

- Orocos operations are a superset of ROS services, so I don't see any
blockers in exposing OwnThread operations --via call()-- as ROS services.
- Actions seem a bit trickier. Maybe an OwnThread operation invoked via
send() (as opposed to call() above) and some additional topics for managing
the status and feedback streams.

All in all, it seems that the main blocker is the lack of a motivated
developer willing to take on this rather than technical issues.

>
> Another thing that I'd like to ensure is that the controller
> infrastructure integrates well with the gazebo simulator, either via
> plugins or just over the gazebo ROS interfaces.
>

Indeed. That's one of the things I'd like to improve in my existing
implementation, where I took the latter approach. I'd prefer to have the
manager integrated inside Gazebo as a plugin. So far it looks feasible, but
haven't gotten down and dirty with it yet.

>
> There's a lot more that I think we should talk about, maybe we should
> create a ros-robot-control-sig?
>

One of the purposes of this thread is to determine if there is critical
mass to keep it alive. My +1 is there.

Adolfo

>
> best,
> -jon
>
>
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