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I'm looking for an inexpensive DC brushed motor controller board with serial interface (preferably USB), encoder feedback, at least 12V/3A continuous current and ROS driver. The only direct reference I found is ROS Motor Controller Drivers at ROS Wiki, but it lists only 3 options and Roboteq AX2550 sort of qualifies, except of the cost. Are there any other options?
What voltage?
I think that your best option is to get yourself and Arduino and some sort of motor control shield. It is trivial to write a program for it take commands and publish sensor data via the serial port.
You would then have to write a small ROS node that sends commands to the arduino and publishes the encoder data back to ROS.
12V or more. I'm considering using microcontroller board with motor driver and writing my own ROS driver - just wanted to know what are the options.
I agree with Dereck and I am using that for two 12V motors at 6 A max.
If you use an Arduino, then you can make use of rosserial (http://wiki.ros.org/rosserial), which already provides everything you need to publish and receive ROS messages.
The Roboclaw has a lot of features and good reviews. I hear you should buy directly from the manufacturer since earlier firmwares are buggy.
I would suggest just buying one of these and writing a rospy pyserial node to communicate to the controller:
Asked: 2013-12-11 00:14:05 -0600
Seen: 3,250 times
Last updated: Dec 11 '13
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My advise would be to widen your options and drop the ROS support requirement. Developing a ROS driver for a serial interface for a motor controller board should be fairly easy.