ROS Control and CAN interface on a custom robot.

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We are also currently working with field robots that use J1939 CAN hydraulic valve controllers. We use CAN communication cards that are compatible with SocketCAN. This makes it extremely easy to send CAN messages from a C++ API. CANopen is limited to industrial robots, which may/may not be what you're using. But if CANopen isn't a possibility, SocketCAN is your next best option. There is USB2CAN from 8devices which is $60, as well as mini PCI-E cards from Innodisk, both of which we have tested and are currently using. The write method of your hardware_interface simply writes a CAN message onto the bus.

Provided you are actually using CANopen, you could look at the ros_canopen packages. The canopen_motor_node abstracts CiA 402 devices, by exposing ros_control compatible hardware interfaces (based on what the configured devices support). There are other OSS implementations for ROS and CANopen, but I don't know of any that come with plug-and-play ros_control support.

After you have the ros_control interface configured, things will be similar to how you used the ur_modern_driver (or at least: I'm assuming that's what you meant when you wrote "used ros_control with Universal Robots").

I was looking for tutorials on the wiki page, and didn't find anything of real use.

That doens't surprise me too much, as "I'm creating a custom robot and interfacing with my actuators and sensors using CAN" is apparently not common enough that it warrant(s)(ed) a dedicated tutorial (yet).

It would be nice to add one though.