Chapter 13: Writing ROS Controllers and Visualization Plugins

In the previous chapter, we discussed pluginlib, nodelets, and Gazebo plugins. The base library for making plugins in ROS is pluginlib, and the same library can be used in nodelets. In this chapter, we will continue with pluginlib-based concepts, such as ROS controllers and ROS visualization (RViz) plugins. We have already worked with ROS controllers and have reused some standard controllers, such as joint state, position, and trajectory controllers, in Chapter 4, Simulating Robots Using ROS and Gazebo.

In this chapter, we will see how to write a basic ROS controller for a generic robot. We will implement the desired controller for our seven-Degree of Freedom (DOF) arm robot, developed in previous chapters, executing it in the Gazebo simulator. RViz plugins can add more functionality to RViz, and in this chapter, we will look at how to create a basic RViz plugin. The detailed topics that we are going to discuss in this...