In comparison to #194, this PR adds the proposed changes while preserving existing behavior of multicopters with the original suction grippers by
adding a new mbzirc_suction_gripper_light model with the proposed mass changes
adding a parameter to multicopter velocity controller plugin to enable/disable rotor thrust computation changes
the updated controller with the thrust changes is only enabled if a quad / hexrotor is equipped with the lightweight version of the suction gripper
Some minor issues I noticed when testing the lightweight gripper:
a quadrotor with light weight suction gripper and no payload drifts slowly upwards in z when set to hover, i.e. linear vel set to zero
a hexrotor with light weight suction gripper is slight more unstable compared to the original suction gripper.
It's possible that we could tune other params to make the flight behavior more stable but at this stage, we prefer not to make more changes. The original gripper has its own caveats. We just give the users an extra option to choose whichever works best for them.
Signed-off-by: Ian Chen ichen@osrfoundation.org
Alternative to #194
In comparison to #194, this PR adds the proposed changes while preserving existing behavior of multicopters with the original suction grippers by
mbzirc_suction_gripper_light
model with the proposed mass changesSome minor issues I noticed when testing the lightweight gripper:
It's possible that we could tune other params to make the flight behavior more stable but at this stage, we prefer not to make more changes. The original gripper has its own caveats. We just give the users an extra option to choose whichever works best for them.
To test:
launch the test environment
Remove a test model in this environment that is not needed
Spawn a quadrotor with the lightweight suction gripper - the new gripper should be green in color
Enable suction
Take off with the blue small box payload
the quadrotor should fly upwards in z faster than with the original suction gripper
Make the quadrotor hover
the quadrotor should hover in place with some small drift