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If you are accurately describing the problem, then the robot's ros-interface code was written by someone who is clueless. The units of /cmd_vel are standardized to meters/sec and radians/sec for very good compatibility reasons.

This scaling should happen in the layer that writes to the motor controller. A good ros-interface implementation will do this scaling in the hardware_interface::RobotHW layer, which is responsible for writing values to the proprietary API of your motor controller.

There is an overview of the architecture here: http://wiki.ros.org/ros_control