Building similar to “SOFA ROS connector plugin”

[ruffy]

As SOFA has been around for 5-6 years so it has a great community support and also has been maintained very efficiently. So, I was trying out the new simulators which have been introduced in the field of soft robotics like ChainQueen, Elastica. They are relatively new, so they don’t have any ROS functionality available for them or a way to connect them with the ROS environment.

So, I was interested in developing some ROS plugin for them like ROS connector in SOFA while utilising SOFA for continuum soft robot simulations parallely. As they utilise techniques different to SOFA which depends on FEM so, it would be interesting to create some RS functionality for them which could ease the process for the developers and researchers.

Therefore, I was looking into the ROS connector plugin for getting an idea of how my objective can be achieved by developing something on the same ground.

I would be truly grateful to you guys if you could help me out or give me direction in this regard.

[Hugo]

Hi @ruffy369

Sorry for the late reply, we had a very busy September month keeping us away from the forum.

Thanks a lot for your enthusiastic feedback, it’s really good to read.

Regarding the coupling SOFA-ROS, as you noted, a plugin was designed for this purpose by an independent developer. However, this was not really further maintained.

However, we recently introduced an advanced integration of SOFA within a Python3.+ environment. Since ROS does have a python interface, you can simply make SOFA and ROS communicate through python.

Note, that I recently heard about a private C++ plugin interface SOFA and ROS (2). I will investigate whether this code could be made open.

Best wishes,

Hugo

[ruffy]

Hi @hugo
Thank you for your reply.
Actually I was trying to use ROS python interface for communicating with an another simulator. And wanted that ROS plugin to look into as a reference. Simple ROS message interface would also work for me.

Best Regards,
Prakarsh

[Hugo]

Hi @ruffy369

Have you looked in this topic/reply:

https://www.sofa-framework.org/community/forum/topic/error-with-plugins-with-sofarosconnector/#post-15665

Best

Hugo

[Author]

Posts