MoveIt Simulator Controller

A simulation interface for a hardware interface for ros_control, and loads default joint values from SRDF

Intended to replace moveit_fake_controller_manager - this repo almost exactly replicates a ros_control hardware setup, and has the new feature of being able to specify an inital position.

This open source project was developed at PickNik Robotics. Need professional ROS development and consulting? Contact us at projects@picknik.ai for a free consultation.

Status:

• Travis CI
• ROS Buildfarm - AMD64 Xenial Debian Build - Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• ROS Buildfarm - AMD64 Xenial Devel Build - Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• ROS Buildfarm - AMD64 Bionic Source Build - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• ROS Buildfarm - AMD64 Bionic Devel Build - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Install

Ubuntu Debian

sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-moveit-sim-controller

Code API

See Class Reference

Quick Start

Our example uses the UR5 robot:

sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-ur5-moveit-config
roslaunch moveit_sim_controller ur5_rviz.launch
roslaunch moveit_sim_controller ur5_sim_controller.launch

You should see the robot launch in Rviz with the arm oriented straight up, which is not the zero/home position. You can change the start position by editing in config/ur5_controllers.yaml the value joint_model_group_pose.

With this simulator you should also be able to use rostopic echo to see the joint_states and tf it is publishing - essentially you have just simulated a full ros_control-based robot without needing hardware. To test with an example joint trajectory, see the demo code in ros_control_boilerplate.

Usage

To set your robot’s initial simulated position, create a planning group in your SRDF using the MoveIt Setup Assistant named something like whole_body or arm that contains all of your robot’s joints. Then, create a pose for the planning group that is your start position, and name it something like home.

Then load this node with the following ROS params (yaml is suggested use):

# MoveIt-specific simulation settings:
moveit_sim_hw_interface:
  joint_model_group: arm
  joint_model_group_pose: home

See ros_control_boilerplate for more detailed instructions about using ros_control to visualize your robot - this package simply inherits from that package and adds some MoveIt! dependencies that can parse SRDFs for your initial state.

Testing and Linting

To run roslint, use the following command with catkin-tools:

catkin build --no-status --no-deps --this --make-args roslint

To run catkin lint, use the following command with catkin-tools:

catkin lint -W2

There are currently no unit or integration tests for this package. If there were you would use the following command with catkin-tools:

catkin run_tests --no-deps --this -i

Contribute

Please send PRs for new helper functions, fixes, etc!