Announcing ros_control updates

General
1

Dear ROS community,

It is my pleasure to bring you the latest updates from the realms of ros_control.
These updates will become available after the next Kinetic sync.

  • joint_trajectory_controller: Support for partial joint trajectories. No longer specifying full goal list if you only need to move a few of them! This in my opinion was a major setback for this controller, I’m glad it’s out of the way now.
    You can enable this behaviour by adding allow_partial_joints_goal: true to your joint_trajectory_controller configuration file.
    I’ve done a test with PAL’s TIAGo on ROS Kinetic that you can see here

  • combined_robot_hardware_interface: A new addition to our core ros_control tools is the possibility to allow plugin based separation of robot_hardware implementations under a single controller_manager. Why, you may ask? It allows hardware manufacturers to ship their robot_hw along with their module which eases integration with an existing system that already runs ros_control.
    A high-res system graph can be found here and the related ROSCon talk here.

I see that we lack documentation therefore I’d like to ask all of you who may already have something to reach out and try to contribute that. Feel free to open a github issue or write to the ROS Control SIG mailing list. Thank you!

Big thumbs to Shadow Robot who were our biggest contributors recently.
Thanks guys, you are awesome!

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