Roboclaw 2x15A Motor Controller

[Henry Acevedo]

Dear All

I want to try this Roboclaw 2x15A Motor Controller with ROS, but I'm not sure if can work under roscpp as far as I know the micro controller are based on Arduino, ans is seems to have some digital inputs for a quadrature encoders , but my worry is that USB connections are kinda unstable and end to disconnect due the serial nature of the implementation.

could you please advice me on this regards

Thank you

Henry

[Girts L]

I've spent quite some time with Roboclaws of different sizes. I have two of 2x15A in my robot right now. The encoder support is a great advantage of the Roboclaw since with it can do PID control on-board. I've successfully used different encoders, like the ones that come with the smaller gearmotors, and some larger standalone open-collector encoders as well. It works.

To use it with ROS you connect the Roboclaw to the USB or UART of your robot's computer, and run a ROS driver for Roboclaw on that computer. I've tried both USB and UART with BeagleBone Black and NVIDIA Jetson TK1. I favor a direct connection over UART, since on USB usually there's lots of other stuff going on.

I'm in the process of opensourcing the driver we used on the MaxedOUT NASA SRRC robot. It's up on https://github.com/SV-ROS/roboclaw_driver, and some more changes are coming.

G

[Henry Acevedo]

Thanks for the help and the advice, I was thinking to use ROS bridge as this MC  is an arduino board, but looking at your code you used the already existing firmware on the board, this simplifies all :) (if I got that right :) )

the node you wrote, reads and pushes data via serial port and uses the pre-existing Roboclaw standard advance packet serial mode command syntax

Thanks, I will buy this controller in the next few weeks, :)  and I will try to port your code over C++ if I get this successfully I will share the code or published on the ROS repository

Thanks 

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Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:59:40 -0700
From: girts...@gmail.com
To: hbrob...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [HBRobotics] Re: Roboclaw 2x15A Motor Controller

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[Girts L]

BTW, there is already a quite elaborate c++ driver https://github.com/bcharrow/scarab/tree/master/roboclaw

I haven't tried it, though. It seems to do PID itself instead of using the one on the board. Maybe that's because a few years ago when it was written Roboclaw had problems with PID, as I read somewhere.

G