I would like to constrain two joints together with a "belt" so that the angles of the two joints remain the same while allowing the forces on each joint to effect the other. Is this possible?
Think of a skid-steer robot with a single motor driving both wheels on the same side of the robot.
there is a pull request (it's just fallen a bit out of date) but the ode_gearbox branch should still work. An example world and an unit test can be found. With this, you can simulate gears with arbitrary ratios, the transmission is enforced by constraints.
You should be able to do this by appropriately defining mechanical transmissions. A prerequisite for this is that your control backend (eg. pr2_controller_manager, ros_control's generic controller_manager -- work in progress) should be able to represent the notion of a transmission.
You would need to implement a custom transmission and define the actuator <-> joint space mappings for the variables of interest, usually effort, velocity and position. Your transmission model can then be as detailed as you need it to, eg. consider or neglect belt elasticity, dead bands, etc.
Asked: 2013-03-12 14:56:32 -0600
Seen: 865 times
Last updated: Mar 13 '13
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