Re-scaling output values of a topic

asked 2021-09-23 04:27:40 -0500

horvath.daniel
15 ●7 ●8 ●13

Hello guys! I'm working on a teleop project with a Spacenav joystick for a UR5e robot arm. I've remapped the topic to which the spacenav_node published originally to /twist_controller/command but the values which the joystick sends are too big for the robot arm to safely use and so the safety is triggered. How do I re-scale the values to more optimal ones? The maximum values which the joystick publishes are ~0.9. How do I scale that range down to -0.04 and 0.04?

I'm thinking of making a separate package which launches in parallel to the spacenav one and which takes the output values and divides them by a constant. Is this a viable solution or is there a simpler method to resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance.

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Hi, I'm not an expert, so this is not an answer, but your solution would also be my approach to solve this. A simple subscriber who publishes the scaled date to a new topic. Another approach could be to implement a scaling factor in the spacenav node.

MarioSpeckert ( 2021-09-23 04:48:22 -0500 )edit

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answered 2021-09-23 05:12:40 -0500

gvdhoorn
86574 ●283 ●1432 ●1054 http://cor.tudelft.nl/

updated 2021-09-23 05:32:02 -0500

Besides writing a custom node, I can come up with two options:

treat your spacenav as a joystick, and use something like teleop_tools/joy_teleop. That node supports scaling and a few other options which seem to do what you describe
keep using raw values from your spacenav, but scale them using topic_tools/transform. That node subscribes to a topic, runs it through a Python expression and then publishes the result to (preferably) a new topic. A previous Q&A about transform is #q261935, which shows how to format complex expressions

I've used both in the past.

Option 1 will probably be the easiest to implement. Option 2 is the most flexible, as it's almost a custom node, but then as an argument to the topic_tools/transform node.

In any case: try to avoid writing code yourself as much as possible.

And something to realise: any additional nodes (or really: publishers and subscribers) you place between your input device and the final consumer of your Twists is going to add delay and jitter. That may not be a problem in your case, but it is something to keep in mind when working with such a system.