ros_control: A generic and simple control framework for ROS

Abstract

In recent years the Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the 'de facto' standard framework for robotics software development. The ros_control framework provides the capability to implement and manage robot controllers with a focus on both real-time performance and sharing of controllers in a robot-agnostic way. The primary motivation for a sepate robot-control framework is the lack of realtime-safe communication layer in ROS. Furthermore, the framework implements solutions for controller-lifecycle and hardware resource management as well as abstractions on hardware interfaces with minimal assumptions on hardware or operating system. The clear, modular design of ros_control makes it ideal for both research and industrial use and has indeed seen many such applications to date. The idea of ros_control originates from the pr2_controller_manager framework specific to the PR2 robot but ros_control is fully robot-agnostic. Controllers expose standard ROS interfaces for out-of-the box 3rd party solutions to robotics problems like manipulation path planning (MoveIt!) and autonomous navigation (the ROS navigation stack). Hence, a robot made up of a mobile base and an arm that support ros_control doesn't need any additional code to be written, only a few controller configuration files and it is ready to navigate autonomously and do path planning for the arm. ros_control also provides several libraries to support writing custom controllers.