Revision history [back]

You seem to misunderstand how hardware_interface::RobotHW is designed to work. With ros_control, the user chooses one of many different JointControllers to sit on top of the RobotHW software layer. A "position_controller" will write a position goal to RobotHW, a "velocity_controller" will write a velocity goal to RobotHW, etc. The RobotHW layer gets to choose which types of JointControllers it wants to support.

For RobotHW, in the typical case, the "write a command goal" and the "read joint state from sensor" parts of the code are completely independent of each other. The standard higher-level software layers of ros_control will send commands down to RobotHW to resolve any error between the joint goal and the current joint state; the author of RobotHW is not responsible for handling this.

But when I try to access the desired values only the position_cmd gets updated on my hardware interface,

This is expected since you have a position_controller sitting on top of RobotHW.