Z1 Hardware Interface

This package contains the hardware interface for the Unitree Z1 robot by leveraging the Unitree provided packages:

• z1_controller: for the direct communication with the robot at a lower level;
• z1_sdk: to access z1_controller from the ROS2 hardware interface and send commands to the manipulator.

In particular, the hardware interface is capable of exposing all command interfaces, namely: position, velocity, and effort (torque).

First startup and network configuration

Prior the starting of the communication with the robot though ROS2, make sure you followed the official instructions before powering the robot.

There, they also show how to correctly setup the local network to ensure the communication with the robot that, by default, has IP address 192.168.123.110. In short, make sure the network port where the robot is connected into is configured with manual IPv4 address and the following parameters:

• address: 192.168.123.235;
• netmask: 255.255.255.0;
• gateway: 192.168.123.1.

z1_controller

This package builds the official z1_controller package, but also install accordingly the executables and the configuration files. For simplicity and ease of modification, the z1_controllers configuration folder has been copied at config/. You may refer to the official website documentation to correctly configure the config.xml file, even though the standard values are good defaults.

Hardware interface

This package implementes a ROS2 control hardware interface by using the z1_sdk library to send low-level command to the robot and read its state.