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(formerly pr2_etherCAT in Groovy and earlier)

Nodes

pr2_ethercat

pr2_ethercat is the node that executes the main loop for controlling the EtherCAT devices (including all motors) on the PR2. It loads pr2_controller_manager, which in turns loads and runs controllers that act directly on the robot's motors. The ROS API detailed below is the interface for controlling pr2_ethercat itself; as a result of loading the controllers, the pr2_ethercat process offers a broader, and varying ROS API. Superuser privileges are required to run pr2_ethercat, to allow it to set its scheduling priority to run as a real-time process.

Services

pr2_ethercat/reset_motors (std_srvs/Empty)

• Reset the motors. This is required after a runstop is reset (by turning the red push-button on the back of the robot, or pressing the "Start" button on the wireless runstop), and after the motors have been halted via the halt_motors service. Most often called from pr2_dashboard.

pr2_ethercat/halt_motors (std_srvs/Empty)

• Halt the motors. To reset them, call reset_motors. Most often called from pr2_dashboard.

Permissions

Running pr2_ethercat requires the following "capabilities":

• CAP_IPC_LOCK Lock memory (mlockall())

• CAP_SYS_NICE Set real-time scheduling policies

• CAP_NET_RAW Use raw sockets (for EtherCAT communications)

Superuser has these capabilities, but they can also be granted to another executable by setting file system attributes on the executable file. The pr2-grant program is a setuid-root program which copies pr2_ethercat to a part of the filesystem where attributes can be set (/var/tmp), and then grants the necessary capabilities to be able to run pr2_ethercaat.

Usage

Usage: ./pr2_ethercat [options]
  Available options
    -i, --interface <interface> Connect to EtherCAT devices on this interface
    -x, --xml <file|param>      Load the robot description from this file or parameter name
    -r, <param>                 Load the robot description from this parameter
    -u, --allow_unprogrammed    Allow control loop to run with unprogrammed devices
    -h, --help                  Print this message and exit

Example

pr2_ethercat is usually executed from a launch file, such as pr2_bringup/pr2.launch. Common configuration:

<node name="realtime_loop" machine="c1" launch-prefix="pr2-grant" pkg="pr2_ethercat" type="pr2_ethercat" args="-i ecat0 -x robot_description"/>

pr2-grant

pr2-grant is a utility that allows a regular user to run pr2_ethercat with appropriate capabilities. See the section in pr2_ethercat on "Permissions."

reset_motors.py

reset_motors.py is a simple command-line script that calls the pr2_ethercat/reset_motors service.

$ rosrun pr2_ethercat reset_motors.py