ROS2 Control Mock Hardware

[ErikParkerrr]

Hi,

It appears this is not implemented. Are there plans to do so? Having to be connected to my whole system to test changes really slows down development.

I use the dummy_hardware feature in the dynamixel_hardware package extensively. It also allows for easily going between simulation and real hardware. Maybe you guys can do it in a similar way to them?

Cheers!

[samuelsadok]

Yes I agree that a dummy mode would be a good thing to have. There was no plan for this but I'm adding it to our backlog. I wonder if maybe a vendor independent "dummy interface" already exists? If not, it should be fairly easy to implement in odrive_ros2_control.

Contributions are also welcome. Some quick pointers:

• The places to look at are odrive_hardware_interface.cpp > ODriveHardwareInterface::read()/write().
• Don't initialize CAN when dummy mode is enabled. Should work in dev container.
• Should support all three control modes (position, velocity, torque aka effort). In velocity mode, we probably want to update position state too. In torque mode, the simplest model would be to consider the axis locked (keep vel = 0).