Integrating ROS with other robot software frameworks, such as OpenRAVE, Player, and Euslisp, has been important to us as it allows developers to leverage the strengths of each. No framework can be the best at everything, so it's important to allow developers to choose the tools they need. This video shows the integration between ROS and the Orocos Real Time Toolkit (RTT), which was done by Orocos developer Ruben Smits during a month-long visit to Willow Garage. Ruben became a vital member of our Milestone 2 team and still managed to have time to build this great, seamless integration.
While ROS has good support for distributing components over the network, RTT offers hard realtime communication between components. This demo combines the best of both worlds: the realtime low level control is handled by a set of RTT components that directly control the the PR2 robot hardware, but the communication between the controllers is visible to the whole ROS network.
The integration makes the RTT components appear as ROS components, without breaking the realtime communication between the RTT components. This allows RTT developers to use tools developed for ROS, such as rviz and rxplot, to visualize the communication between controllers.
-- Wim Meeusen
Leave a comment