Originally published at the ROS Industrial blog:
This summer, Risto Kojcev, sponsored by the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) and directed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and the ROS-Industrial (ROS-I) Consortium developed a user friendly ROS Interface to control and change a manipulator into Cartesian Impedance control mode. The external forces that the robot applies to the environment can also be set with the developed interface.
Risto shares:
Our first goal was to create a set of common messages containing the necessary parameters for setting Impedance and Force control. This allows interaction between the ROS ecosystem and the ROS driver of the robot. The messages are created based on the commonly used parameters for Impedance/Force control and discussion with the ROS community. The relevant current set of ROS messages are available in the majorana repository. I would also like to encourage the Robotics community to contribute to this project by sharing their suggestions. I believe that this set of messages could still be more generalized and improved based on community input.
The second goal was to develop a user interface which allows the user to set the necessary parameters for Cartesian Impedance/Force Control and interactively switch between control modes. In this case I have expanded previous GSoC 2014 Project: Cartesian Path Planner Plug-In for MoveIt!. The updated plugin now contains the relevant UI fields for setting Cartesian Impedance and Force Control. Depending on the implementation and the properties of the robot controller, this plugin also allows interactively switching between control modes during runtime.
