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Considering the fact that Boston Dynamics has open sourced their API, I am looking to write a ROS wrapper for it so the ROS community can easily utilize the Spot. What are the steps needed to make a repository like this.
What is a good repository I should base my structure off of?
This is something I want to work on but do not how to get started on it.
Personally I would analyse what the functionality is the SDK offers and then try to map that to well-know ROS interfaces. Example: Spot probably offers an interface which allows you to command it to walk with a certain velocity. If that would also include a direction, this would probably map to a regular geometry_msgs/Twist interface, which would be the standard interface for a "mobile platform".
As Spot is a quadruped, you could perhaps take a look at other quadrupeds with ROS compatibility/interfaces. One example would be ANYmal. You may find their Github organisation at github/ANYbotics.
For an overview of the architecture of its software, you could refer to the presentation one of their engineers gave at ROSCon 2016: ANYmal at the ARGOS Challenge: Tools and Experiences from the Autonomous Inspection of Oil & Gas Sites with a Legged Robot (video, slides).
You would not need to implement all of those pieces of course, as Spot comes with quite a large part of that "built-in", but it would give you an idea of the ROS API that your wrappers could provide on-top of Spot's SDK.
Asked: 2020-02-21 15:45:48 -0500
Seen: 218 times
Last updated: Feb 22 '20
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I would also suggest you change the title of your question. As-is, it's very generic, but your question text contains a question that is rather specific to Spot and how to wrap its SDK.