Hello ROS Community!
We are happy to share with you our progress on a new package to easily interface EtherCAT compatible modules with ros2_control.
EtherCAT provides applications with the capacity of reliable, real-time communication between systems and is therefore a common industrial standard. In order to simplify the development/deployment of new application using EtherCAT modules, our package ethercat_driver_ros2 allows to simply combine them with ros2_control. In order to have an even more flexible system design, our driver provides the user with the capacity of easy assemble of EtherCAT based hardware components into complex systems by providing a generic way to parametrize and assemble ros2_control hardware interfaces. It allows to define systems based on EtherCAT modules that can be defined only by adding their composition using standard ros2_control description files. In our architecture, all EtherCAT modules are built as plugins making the integration of new modules independent of the overall framework.
We are actively looking for contributors and as much feedback as possible to make our package even more user-friendly and increase our code-base with new EtherCAT module plugins.
