[ros-users] Joint controller manager

[Willy Lambert]

2013/1/28 Jonathan Bohren <jonathan.bohren at gmail.com>:
> Adolpho,
>
> 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.
>
> One thing that I think the ros-orocos integration needs is better support
> for actionlib for calling orocos operations over ROS.

+1

>
> 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.
>
> There's a lot more that I think we should talk about, maybe we should create
> a ros-robot-control-sig?
>
> best,
> -jon
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 10:04 AM, Adolfo Rodríguez Tsouroukdissian
> <adolfo.rodriguez at pal-robotics.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello ROS and Orocos users,
>>
>> This is a call for feedback. I'm currently working on a "joint controller
>> manager", that is, a component that manages joint resources and exposes them
>> to control. For those familiar with the pr2_controller_manager, this would
>> provide similar functionality and interfaces, while relaxing some
>> constraints to allow easy porting to different hardware platforms. Exposing
>> hardware to control (and realtime control in particular) is still a big
>> hurdle, and it would be very desirable to make this at least an order of
>> magnitude easier. Once a minimal set of controller interfaces are made
>> available for a given platform (eg. mobile base controller, spline
>> interpolator, ...), a truckload of higher-level functionality becomes
>> available.
>>
>> At the moment I have an existing in-house solution that from a ROS API
>> point of view looks pretty much like a pr2_controller_manager, and a design
>> of where I'd like things to go, which is attached to this message in pdf
>> form. As a next step I was planning on setting up a public repo and port the
>> existing design from Orocos 1.x to Orocos 2.x, which adds the expressivity
>> needed to address the missing features. But before that, I'd like to make a
>> pause and ask for some feedback.
>>
>> - Is there interest in giving this topic a dedicated discussion place,
>> like a mailing list or a ROS special interest group?.
>>
>> - If you take a look at the attached design, please be critic about it.
>> What would you add or remove?, what would you do differently?.
>>
>> - What can you not accomplish (or have had trouble accomplishing) with the
>> tools you or your team have used so far?.
>>
>> Finally, I'd like to be aware of any active and similarly scoped
>> initiative, so please let me know if you're working on the subject. Late
>> last week I found out almost by chance about the yet undocumented
>> ros_control [1] repository, which deferred the writing of this email a day
>> so I could familiarize with it. Its scope is very much aligned with my
>> current objectives, as it consists of a library offering functionality
>> similar to that of the pr2_controller_manager that can be adapted to other
>> robot platforms. I'm looking forward to sharing opinions and use cases with
>> all interested parties, and if possible map interest overlaps to common
>> code. Some questions that come to my mind after reviewing the code in [1]:
>>
>> - Is it possible to have a controller with multiple interfaces (eg. send
>> position + velocity + effort commands)?.
>>
>> - If I understand correctly, interfaces are limited by design to position,
>> velocity and effort, and adding a new one (fancy example: stiffness) is not
>> possible, correct?.
>>
>> - Is it possible to chain controllers as in the attached figure
>> (r_arm_follow_joint_traj + r_arm_pid_controller) from configuration files,
>> ie. without writing code?.
>>
>> - Controllers running at lower frequency than the manager need to
>> implement this by doing work only one out of every n cycles, as separate
>> controller threads are not supported, correct?.
>>
>> - Is there any work on decoupling the more common "workhorse" controllers
>> out of the pr2_controller_manager infrastructure (eg. a couple of mobile
>> base implementations, the FollowJointTrtajectory action)?. I've already
>> spent some time factoring out the spline splicing and interpolation code
>> from the FollowJointTrtajectory action, and was planning on writing some
>> unit tests on it. If not, I can also make this available once the cleanup is
>> complete.
>>
>> That's it for now, thanks for reading.
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/willowgarage/ros_control
>>
>> --
>> Adolfo Rodríguez Tsouroukdissian
>> Senior robotics engineer
>> adolfo.rodriguez at pal-robotics.com
>> http://www.pal-robotics.com
>>
>> PAL ROBOTICS S.L
>> c/ Pujades 77-79, 4º4ª
>> 08005 Barcelona, Spain.
>> Tel. +34.93.414.53.47
>> Fax.+34.93.209.11.09
>> Skype: adolfo.pal-robotics
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>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Jonathan Bohren
> PhD Student
> Dynamical Systems and Control Laboratory
> Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
> The Johns Hopkins University
>
> (707) 520-4736
> jbo at jhu.edu
>
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