TVMC

The Thrustered Vehicle Motion Controller.

This is a upgrade of rose_tvmc TVMC. This code is migrated to ROS2.

Key modules like roscpp and rospy are replaced with their ROS2 equivalent rclcpp and rclpy.

This is a standalone package that is meant to be used as-is, and can controlled via exposed ros topics.

Building and Running

This depends on the pecka_tvmc_msg package, which contains required message files. Messages are provided separately in case you don't need the whole TVMC itself, but still want to interface with it in a separate package. Just put that in a directory next to this in the workspace.

You will need to provide libInterpolate to use this package.

To install, clone the repository and build as directed here.
libInterpolate itself depends on boost, 'Catch3' and Eigen3, which you will also need to install.

Sometimes with the default Eigen3 install, the include paths are not as expected by libInterpolate.
If this is the case, you should get an error similar to this:

fatal error: Eigen/Dense: No such file or directory

You can fix this pretty easily by just creating symlinks to get around the problem, as described here.

Basically do:

# or /usr/local/include, should be in there somewhere
$ cd /usr/include  

# we can see that the library is installed but the path is not as expected
$ ls -d eigen*
eigen3

# symlink your problems away
$ sudo ln -sf eigen3/Eigen Eigen
$ sudo ln -sf eigen3/unsupported unsupported

Then you should be good to colcon build this.

Basic Overview

The TVMC will take in either manual thrust vectors for each degree for freedom (surge, sway, heave, pitch, roll and yaw), and will use provided thruster maps to convert these directional/angular movements into thrust values for each thruster.

Additionally, PWM values for these thrust values are computed based on a provided Thrust-to-PWM mapping. This allows for linear control of thrust from the thrusters.

If this is not desired, a simple Thrust-to-PWM map with only two values (MaxPWM-MaxThrust, MinPWM-MinThrust) will cause the PWM Reporter to behave as though there is no Thrust-to-PWM mapping is non-existent.