UR5e Gazebo joint velocity controller package with ros_control

This package provides simulated velocity control of a UR5e in Gazebo. I surprisingly couldn't find an existing solution for this. This package is based heavily on the roboticscasual blog post here, which implemented position control.

Requirements

Tested on ROS Noetic. Requires the ur-description package, which provides robot descriptions for UR manipulators.

For the manipulator + Robotiq gripper, also need the Robotiq package and the libroboticsgroup Gazebo plugins.

Usage

Simply run

roslaunch ur5e-joint-velocity-control ur5e_gazebo_joint_velocity_control.launch

to launch a Gazebo interface with the UR5e loaded.

Errors about setting PID gains can be safely avoided. They aren't necessary for JointVelocityControllers, so I'm not sure why I'm seeing angry red text.

Issue commands to the joint_group_vel_controller/command topic. It accepts Float64MultiArray messages.