Modify RosEthercat to work with ros control properly

[dg-shadow]

[guihomework]

Hi @dg-shadow , this sounds as an interesting project. May I ask for one or 2 sentences on the main changes that are supposed to be done ? Does this also tackle the issue that other data than joint data would be available as a resource (like tactile data not being part of an actuator for instance, or palm data being also available as a resource) ? thanks

[dg-shadow]

Principally, the changes are simply to the way the driver is launched. At the moment, a RosEthercat is instantiated in a ros_ethercat_loop. Instead we add an entry to the robot_hardware parameter and run a ros_control_robot node which in turn creates the RosEthercat instance. The only change to the code is to add a filter parameter to select which joints from the robot_description are to be controlled.

At the moment this doesn't address any other issues. The purpose is to make the hand and ur arm drivers consistent (arm driver has been changed to be RobotHW rather than a controller as it is currently).

[guihomework]

@dg-shadow thanks for the explanation. Will the change still permit to run the ros_ethercat_loop (we don't have other ros_control robots) ?

[dg-shadow]

Yes, the old driver will still work.