stack-of-tasks/ros2_control_solo

ROS2_CONTROL SOLO 12

Overview

This repository simulates a quadruped robot, SOLO 12, in the Gazebo simulator. Furthermore, this repository relies only on the effort interface from ROS2_control.

Installations

We use ROS 2 Foxy. Here are the dependencies used.

• ros2-control
• ros2-controllers
• ros-foxy-gazebo-ros-pkgs
• ros-foxy-xacro
• ros-foxy-gazebo-ros2-control
• ros-foxy-realtime-tools
• ros-foxy-angles
• odri-control-interface and master-board directories from this link. These packages and the ones listed below should go in the src folder of your workspace.
  • The instructions for getting those packages are available in the README.md file from the link above. Once you compile and obtain them, you can create a symbolic link to the src folder of your current workspace (e.g., for odri-control-interface, ln -s path-to-odri-control-interface-package path-to-your-workspace-src-folder)
• mpi_cmake_modules from here
• pybind11 from here
• eigenpy from here
• doxygen

You can also run rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y to install everything in one command, but it might miss a dependency (as I might not have listed all dependencies). Once the dependencies are installed, build the workspace with colcon build --symlink-install. Note that if building the workspace consumes too much memory, you can try instead MAKEFLAGS="-j1 -l1" colcon build --symlink-install --executor sequential. Finally, if this is your first time building the workspace, it might throw an error about a package not found. If so, source your workspace (i.e., source install/setup.bash) and try again.

Running the simulation

The following commands simulate SOLO in Gazebo. Note that before running the simulation, in the package ros2_description_solo, on line 1031 of the file urdf/solo12_simulation.sdf, please write your absolute path to the file src/ros2_control_solo_bringup/config/solo_gazebo_test_controllers.yaml (in the ros2_control_solo_bringup package) (as I have not figured out how to dynamically determine the absolute path of a file in an SDF file).

1. Source ROS2 foxy and source your install file in the workspace
2. source /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh (since some Gazebo environment variables will be overridden)
3. In your workspace directory, ros2 launch ros2_control_solo_bringup solo_system_effort_only_gazebo.launch.py launches the Gazebo simulation with SOLO.

Repository Description

models: stores the world files and model files used by the world files.

• a plugin was added to the default empty.world from ROS 2, so the current position and orientation of SOLO could be read from Gazebo.

ros2_control_solo_bringup: composed of launch files and yaml files storing parameters. Relevant files are:

• solo_system_effort_only_gazebo.launch.py launches Gazebo to simulate the robot.
• In the config folder, solo_gazebo_test_controllers.yaml is called by solo12.urdf.xacro and solo12_simulation.sdf in the ros2_description_solo package. It contains parameters used by ros2_control.

ros2_description_solo: contains the description and meshes files for SOLO 12.

• the 2 folders in use are meshes and urdf
• In the urdf subdirectory, solo12_simulation.sdf is manually generated from solo12.urdf.xacro. This SDF file is used to spawn SOLO in Gazebo. The SDF file has contact and friction properties that the xacro/URDF file cannot specify. These parameters were manually added.

Notes

• package.xml and README.md files for individual packages need to be updated.