ctrl_lib - Controller Library for Whole-Body Control

Code API | Full Documentation

This task library provides a collection of task and joint space controllers for implementing tasks in a Whole-Body Control framework.

ctrl_lib was initiated and is currently developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen.

Motivation

WBC is a framework for optimization-based control of redundant robots. This task library provides thin wrappers for the controllers implemented in the WBC library, to be used within the Rock framework. Examples of implemented controllers are

• CartesianPositionController: Position/velocity controller with acceleration feed forward in Cartesian space
• JointPositionController: Position/velocity controller with acceleration feed forward in joint space
• JointLimitAvoidance: Joint position limit avoidance based on potential fields
• CartesianRadialPotentialFields: Collision avoidance in Cartesian space

Getting Started

• Please check out the tutorials section in the documentation for examples of usage.

Requirements / Dependencies

Currently supported OS: Ubuntu18.04, Ubuntu20.04

This task library is for sole use within the Rock framework. I.e., you require a full Rock installation to use it. In addition, it has the following 1st order dependencies:

• WBC library

Installation

• New Bootstrap: See here
• Existing Rock Installation: Add the wbc package set to your autoproj/manifest file:

  package_sets:
  - github: ARC-OPT/package_set
  

  followed by aup control/orogen/ctrl_lib and then amake control/orogen/ctrl_lib

Testing

Please check the unit tests here, as well as the tutorials in the WBC task library.

Contributing

Please use the issue tracker to submit bug reports and feature requests.

Please use merge requests as described here to add/adapt functionality.

License

orogen-ctrl_lib is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license.

Acknowledge WBC

If you use Ctrl_lib within your scientific work, please cite the following publication:

@INPROCEEDINGS{mronga2022,
author = "D. Mronga and S.Kumar and F.Kirchner",
title = "Whole-Body Control of Series-Parallel Hybrid Robots",
year = "2022",
note = "{2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}, Accepted for publication",
}

Funding

Ctrl_lib has been developed in the research projects TransFit (Grant number 50RA1701) and BesMan (Grant number 50RA1216) funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). It is further developed in the M-Rock (Grant number 01IW21002) and VeryHuman (Grant number 01IW20004) projects funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with federal funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Maintainer / Authors / Contributers

Dennis Mronga, dennis.mronga@dfki.de

Copyright 2017, DFKI GmbH / Robotics Innovation Center