Scara tutorial ROS2

The ros2_control framework is a realtime control framework designed for general robotics applications that gains more and more attention both for research and industrial purposes. An overview of the ros2_control framework can be found here.

This tutorial is made to understand the basic concepts of controlling a robot using ros2_control. In particular, it describes how to :

• Write a URDF description of a simple SCARA manipulator
• Launch and interact with the SCARA robot
• Write a custom hardware interface for the SCARA robot
• Write a custom controller for the SCARA robot
• Set up the SCARA manipulator to run with ros2_control and Gazebo

Getting Started

Required setup : Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and ROS2 Humble

1. Install ros2 packages. The current development is based of ros2 humble. Installation steps are described here.
2. Source your ros2 environment:

   source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

   NOTE: The ros2 environment needs to be sources in every used terminal. If only one distribution of ros2 is used, it can be added to the ~/.bashrc file.

3. Install colcon and its extensions :

   sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions

4. Create a new ros2 workspace:

   mkdir ~/ros2_ws/src

5. Pull relevant packages, install dependencies, compile, and source the workspace by using:

   cd ~/ros2_ws
   git clone https://github.com/ICube-Robotics/scara_tutorial_ros2.git src/scara_tutorial_ros2
   rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths . -y -r
   colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release --symlink-install
   source install/setup.bash

Acknowledgments

This tutorial is partially inspired from pac48's tutorial and the official ros2_control website.

Contacts

ICube Laboratory, University of Strasbourg, France

Maciej Bednarczyk: m.bednarczyk@unistra.fr, @github: mcbed