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Clearpath's Husky is also using ros_control. The main reason for most people to implement a ros_control layer is to gain access to the standard set of controllers & a fairly seamless gazebo integration.

I agree that relying on ROS services in a RobotHW is not a great idea but if you can do it with topics, you suddenly have a non-blocking setup which, provided that the rest of the system manages to keep up, should work out fairly well. Of course you won't have realtime-safety guarantees but if you are running something low-rate of fairly safe, you are probably going to be fine.

The most extreme non-realtime ros_control implementation I made had a texas instruments microcontroller board talked to ros_control over rosserial and some topics. It was fine, ros_control is not only for industrial communication back-ends.

Here's a great example from Clearpath on how to make a very simple RobotHW implementation with topics, no realtime guarantees: https://github.com/jackal/jackal_robot