melodic noetic

Overview

A package for ROS-controllers and HW Interface mechanisms to enable forwarding of trajectories (both joint-based and Cartesian) to the robot for interpolation.

Rationale

The idea behind these controllers is to enable forwarding (pass through) incoming trajectories directly to the robot and let the OEM driver-side take care of interpolating between the waypoints. This is useful if your application demands industrial scale trajectory execution, and you prefer not to interpolate on the ROS side. Having the complete trajectory available on the driver side can be beneficial regarding smoothness of execution and avoid issues related to sending (streaming) ad hoc commands, as is classically done with current ROS-control approaches. The controllers implement simple action servers for trajectory execution (both Cartesian and joint-based). They are meant to be light-weight and their functionality is deliberately limited to starting trajectories, canceling them, and providing real-time feedback on progress.

Note that most of the work has to be done in the hardware abstraction of the robot. And, unfortunately, this is very robot specific and hard to generalize. It's somewhat similar to the read() and write() functions of ROS-control, which need to implement robot-specific protocols. This package provides the necessary HW interfaces to implement this feature.

Further information

For further information, especially how to integrate this into a RobotHW interface, see the Documentation on GitHub