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Xbot2 ROS API

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Integration between Xbot2 and ROS is made possible by two plugins, namely ros_io and ros_control, that come with the Xbot2 package itself. They are responsible for providing the following functionalities:

  • ros_io offers plugin management funcionalities and robot state broadcasting, such as:
    • get_plugin_list service to get the list of initialized plugins
    • <plugin_name>/switch to enable or disable a plugin
    • <plugin_name>/state to monitor its state (among a defined plugin lifecycle state machine)
    • <plugin_name>/abort to abruptly stop a plugin
    • joint state broadcast to the joint_states topic
    • transforms broadcast to the /tf topic
    • execution statistics broadcast to the statistics topic
    • joint device safety management, such as:
      • enabling/disabling joint reference filtering (enable_joint_filter)
      • changing its cutoff frequency (set_filter_profile_*)
      • enabing/disabling the joint device (joint_master/set_control_mask)
  • ros_control forwards any message received on the command topic to the motor control API

Note that, by default, all ROS resource names live inside the /xbotcore namespace.

Python

Follow the provided Jupyter Notebook (install with pip install notebook if needed) to get a grasp on how to control an Xbot2 robot in joint space from a python ROS node. Just type the command

jupyter notebook ros_api_tutorial.ipynb

Note: to run a jupyter notebook from inside a docker container, use the following command

jupyter notebook --no-browser --ip=0.0.0.0 <notebook-file>.

and make sure that port 8888 is being published to the host machine. Our example docker provides the notebook_docker alias for the sake of convenience.

C++

The same behavior can be equivalently implemented in C++, as shown by this example. After compilation, it can be executed with

cd <build-dir> && ./src/ros_api/ros_api_tutorial

GUI

Monitoring and interaction with the Xbot2 framework can be done with a GUI tool, as well, which is written in Qt5 and on top of the aforementioned ROS API. Top open it, just type

xbot2-gui