Developing a MoveIt compatible driver for Hekulex Servos

MoveIt
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I’ve been developing a ROS driver for the Hekulex family of smart servos over the last couple of months. We are building a simple arm using these servos and we’ll be controlling it using MoveIt. The standard interfaces I have or am in the process of adding are the joint_state topic and trajectory action server.
This is the minimum required to be able to control the hardware but I wanted to know what other interfaces would be worth implementing? For example what is the velocity control interface used by the Jog Arm package?

I also wanted to ask at what level of development should I add this package to the wiki and buildfarm? It’s available now on my GitHub and I’d like to get some feedback from more experienced robot driver developers.

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I can answer a small part of that. jog_arm uses ros_control position_controllers/JointGroupPositionControllers or velocity_controllers/JointGroupVelocityControllers. Those are the controller types that allow for streaming commands.

If I could only choose one, I would choose the velocity_controllers/JointGroupVelocityControllers. It will be more responsive.

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Thanks for the info. I’ll look into adding the velocity controllers, that should be fairly straightforwards with the interface they have.

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