micro-ROS enabled robot and kinematics

[vmayoral]

@mmigliavacca

Approach 3. is a compromise between the two, with native ROS interface and advanced kinematics. In this case we can have both simple embedded kinematics (let’s say for teleop only) and advanced kinematics for autonomous navigation. But in the ros2_control hardware interface we need to publish and subscribe ROS topics, which seems uncommon and probably not the most efficient solution.

I would strongly recommend to consider this approach when building new hardware or products. Beyond the intuition @tfoote points out, we did lots research and benchmarking in the past (e.g. 1, 2, 3 among others) which ended up showing how native RTPS interactions offered many advantages, simplified strongly system integration and overall, allowed to build products that were easier to use and independent of other subsystems (note that with micro-ROS you do depend on the DDS bridging on external compute resources, which needs to be properly optimized and fine tuned for each specific application). There’re various open source implementations you can use as a starting point.

For existing hardware, micro-ROS is indeed a great choice to bridge to the ROS world. Note however this comes at the cost of having to optimize every bridge with the RTPS/DDS network.