There are three example drivers inside the package actuator_array_example. The first example demonstrates the use of the actuator_array_driver base class. This example makes use of convenience classes provided in the base class to read a simple list of actuators from the parameter server and set up the standard Actuator Array Driver communication interface. A Dummy Actuator class is used to simulate the operation of a real R/C Servo motor. This removes the need to have specific hardware to test the basic Actuator Array Driver system. The code contained in this tutorial is available in the actuator_array_example package.

This example expands on Example1. In this tutorial we will modify the Example1 driver to read additional properties from the YAML configuration file. To do this we will make use of a custom JointProperties structure to hold the additional properties and the init_actuator_() function hook provided by the base class to fill them in.

In this example we will set parameters for each servo based on information stored in the urdf robot description. Because the base class was designed to use the robot description information, there are very few code changes. The only difference is the custom init_actuator_() function now makes use of information obtained from the robot description instead of using hard-coded defaults. The only extra work really involved is in the creation of the robot description file itself.

This tutorials creates a custom Actuator Array Driver using the rosserial_arduino package to communicate with an Arduino board.