Webots and ros_control

General
, ,
1

ros_control is now a part of the standard Webots ros controller!

Even though our focus is the integration of Webots and ROS 2, we still actively maintain and develop our ROS 1 interface.

We believe that the ros_control integration will accelerate the development and adoption of Webots in projects that depend on controllers such as diff_drive_controller, joint_state_controller, joint_trajectory_controller, and similar.

Some other perks:

  • a robot_description parameter is automatically exposed (and yes, you can edit robot model in Webots and a new URDF is automatically generated), and
  • topics are automatically created for all available sensors.

How to use it?

The new ros controller is included in Webots R2021b available as a part of our nightly builds:
https://github.com/cyberbotics/webots/releases

And a usage example:
https://github.com/cyberbotics/webots_ros/blob/develop/launch/pioneer3at.launch

Want more details?

See relevant PRs:

6 Likes
2

Thanks for introducing this change, @lukicdarkoo and team!

1 Like
3

Dear @lukicdarkoo,

Thanks for you and the team’s excellent work and updates.

Could you kindly let me know what working environment you are using for this work? I tried to install Webots R2021b nightly build (22-4-2021) on my Ubuntu 20.04 + ROS noetic but I got ‘error while loading shared libraries: libboost_system.so.1.65.1’

Best regards,

Rui

4

That is odd. You got the error after running roslaunch webots_ros pioneer3at.launch? Could you please share the full error log and the list of commands you called?

BTW, I believe ROS Answers are a better place for these kinds of questions:
https://answers.ros.org/questions/

5

The webots_ros2 package now comes with ros2_control integration!

Recently, we have introduced a new C++ plugin mechanism to the webots_ros2 package (based on pluginlib). And of course, the first plugin featuring the new mechanism is the webots_ros2_control - ros2_control integration.

We hope that this integration will help you taking advantage of the prebuilt ROS 2 controllers.

You want to use ros2_control and Webots in your next project? You will probably find the following resources useful:

4 Likes
6

Wow :grinning: The Webots Simulator is a great tool for fast prototyping !!!