Controller Spawner stuck while loading

edit

Hi everyone,

I am working on a robotics project based in ROS where we started with out simulation in Gazebo and built all our algorithms around the simulation while waiting for our actual robot to arrive.

Now that the actual robot has arrived we are moving away from the gazebo model in order to implement on the real robot. We have been using ros_control in order to control all of the motors on the robot (velocity controlled motors). What I have been working on most recently is converting the gazebo_ros control package so that the code we have currently written will all work with the real robot. I have managed to write up the hardware interface so that all the joints are being correctly identified and read in from the urdf files and robot state publisher is able to receive and publish the joint states being published.

The controller manager is also being instantiated from within my newly written node to run all of the controllers. The issue I am currently having is that when launching all of the nodes the controller spawner is recognising the controller manager as it is finding the various services required but gets stuck trying to load the controller.

The terminal output just shows:

Loading controller: joint_back_left_wheel_controller

When we launch the gazebo simulated version the spawner does not get stuck at this stage and is able to launch all 6 of the controllers that have been setup in a .yaml configuration file.

Does anyone know what could be the issue here? Or if theres anything I can check that will be helpful to debugging this issue.

Thanks for you help in advance.

*EDIT 1*

The above issue was solved by gvdhoorn's suggestion below of creating the multi-threaded spinner. However now it is getting locked after loading all the controllers where it prints:

Controller Spawner: Loaded Controllers:

and then lists the loaded controllers.

When I shut down the node the following is printed out.

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/ros/kinetic/lib/controller_manager/spawner", line 207, in <module>
    if __name__ == '__main__': main()
  File "/opt/ros/kinetic/lib/controller_manager/spawner", line 199, in main
    resp = switch_controller(loaded, [], 2)
  File "/opt/ros/kinetic/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rospy/impl/tcpros_service.py", line 435, in __call__
    return self.call(*args, **kwds)
  File "/opt/ros/kinetic/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rospy/impl/tcpros_service.py", line 523, in call
    raise rospy.exceptions.ROSInterruptException("node shutdown interrupted service call")
rospy.exceptions.ROSInterruptException: node shutdown interrupted service call

Does anyone know how I might go about solving this? thanks