Hi,

I want to teleoperate a free floating Gazebo model of the Shadow hand (i.e. without arm kinematics) by means of a 6D pose sensor attached to the wrist of the operator. I tried to use the /gazebo/setmodelstate service to directly set the model pose to the transformed pose of the sensor, but this results in the model "jumping around" if the physics are enabled.

Then I added a fixed dummy base link connected to the model via a floating joint and tried a robotmechanismcontrollers/CartesianPoseController to track the pose of the model. However, the floating joint is not recognized by the controller and gets converted to a fixed joint on loadup. So, the question is if there is some workaround allowing the controller to track the "free floating" pose without a defined kinematic chain.

Also, I noticed that apart from the robotmechanismcontrollers/CartesianPoseController, there are robotmechanismcontrollers/JTCartesianController and teleop_controllers/JTTeleopController, both of which seem to be similar controller types but the documentation is a bit sparse. Maybe someone with more experience could give some hints about the conceptual differences/intended applications of those controllers?

Thanks, -Robert-