ROS (Robot Operating System) and linuxcnc / HAL ringbuffer integration?

Hi

I have been looking at some developments in machinekit, which I understand is an lcnc offshoot, where people are trying to pass trajectory streams from a ROS moveit planner directly to machinekit, using the HAL ringbuffer(?).

This is useful or a number of reasons. One is that ROS currently lacks drivers for mesa cards (or at least none that I can find). Two is that in robotic perception tasks, where pointcloud data is used to create a 3d model of a real world setup, ROS can generate paths on the fly around the obstacles in order to e.g. pick up one item on a table without disturbing others.

I've seen some discussion here before about generating individual jobs in a ROS node and sending them to linuxcnc, however this ringbuffer method sounds intriguing. See "jplan, ring buffers and, trajectory playout" on this page machinekoder.com/machinekit-ros-open-source-robots/ .

Is this something that is feasible in linuxcnc, and how might I go about it technically?

Cheers

This might be a better question for the developers mailing list.
sourceforge.net/p/emc/mailman/emc-developers/

This is a question for machinekit.
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/machinekit

Linxcnc does not have HAL ring buffers.
I know of no projects that connected linuxcnc and ROS together - only machinekit.

machinekit and linuxcnc have diverged quite a bit - particularly in HAL.

That's a really interesting link by the way. - linuxcnc is lacking a bit of excitement.

Chris M
Chris M

Thanks guys, I will check out the machinekit forum. ROS seems to have quite limited controller support, I wonder if there are any developments in the offing with mesa?

Linuxcnc is a numerical control system. I think unless you control CNC through gcode, it is not exactly the same as the goal of ROS. Why do you have to use linuxcnc to complete the control? It seems that this is redundant. When we can choose ROS, it may be a better choice to use ROS to comprehensively control the robot. Of course, if it really needs to be connected together, you can redevelop it Linux CNC or use machinekit