2017-002 – ROS Effort with Dynamics (REWD) Controllers

The REWD Controllers are a software library that conforms to the ROS (Robot Operating System) ros_control framework of pluggable controllers. It provides a set of robot controllers that output effort commands (usually torque) from various input set points.The controllers uniquely use the DART (Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit) library to incorporate rigid body dynamics calculations in the control loop, enabling their use in arbitrary robotic hardware models. This results in more accurate control and control modes such as gravity compensation. The controllers are intended to be real-time safe while still exposing standard ROS APIs for setting targets, reading progress and cancelling operations.The controllers are currently in use on the HERB platform. Scott McEvoy smcevoy@andrew.cmu.edu 412-268-6053