Coppeliasim_ros_control

This is a ROS package for integrating the ros_control controller architecture with the coppeliasim simulator.

Dependencies

• hardware_interface
• transmission_interface
• control_toolbox
• urdf

Building

The following instructions assume that a catkin workspace has been created at $HOME/catkin_ws and Coppeliasim directory is placed at the Home directory $HOME/CoppeliaSim. you always can update the paths based on your machine setup.

# change to the src directory in your Catkin workspace
 cd $HOME/catkin_ws/src

# Clone Coppeliasim_ros_control pkg 
 git clone https://github.com/mahmoud-a-ali/coppeliasim_ros_control

# change to the main Catkin workspace
 cd ..

# build the workspace (using catkin_tools)
 catkin build

# After building, you can check if the plugin 'libsimExtRosControl.so' was successfuly by listing the content of the devel/lib
 ls devel/lib/

Running

The generated plugin should be loaded while starting coppeliasim, this can be done by copying the plugin 'libsimExtRosControl.so' to the main directory of Coppeliasim $HOME/CoppeliaSim

# Copy the generated plugin to CoppeliaSim directory
cp  $HOME/catkin_ws/devel/lib/libsimExtRosControl.so  $HOME/CoppeliaSim/

In a new terminal start a ros master before you start CoppelliaSim

roscore

In a nother terminal run CoppeliaSim

# change to Coppeliasim dir 
cd $HOME/CoppeliaSim

# run Coppeliasim
./coppeliaSim.sh

In the same terminal running Coppeliasim, you can see the following message indicating a successful loading of the RosControl plugin

Plugin 'RosControl': loading...
[DEBUG] [1602118275.276717674]:  initialize MyRobot hardware_interface!
Plugin 'RosControl': load succeeded.

By starting the simulation in coppeliasim, the plugin will wait for the robot description to be availabe in the parameter server.

Example

Refer to ur5_coppeliasim_roscontrol package on how you can use the coppeliasim_ros_control plugin to control ur5 robot. You can also create a similar configuration package for any robot.

Limitation

currenlty, both position and velocity controllers works properly. but the effort controller not properly working. The reason why effort control mode is not working -not implemented yet- is that Coppeliasim provides a direct APIs for only position/velocity control modes, and there is no direct API for the effort control mode. More information about how effort controllers is implemented in coppeliasm can be found in their website.