I just recently learned about Drake https://drake.mit.edu/ and had a look at the Deepnote tutorials (which I liked a lot). From my first impressions, Drake looks like a very capable and well documented tool, which is why I would like to use it for defining and solving an MPC problem for a robotic manipulator. I am now at the point where I want to switch from the online tutorials to implementing my first own C++ examples locally. Before doing so I wanted to check if Drake is actually the right tool for my use case since in my project I need to interface an existing program running in ROS noetic with C++. I think it should be sufficient if I would be able to publish and subscribe ROS messages from my new Drake program with a frequency of ~5-100Hz. But I am currently struggling to find the best way to do this. Therefore, I have a couple of questions:
- Is it possible at all (which I assume)?
- Which build system should I use?
- E.g., should I compile Drake using catkin as described here: https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake-external-examples/tree/main/drake_catkin_installed? If yes, should I write and execute my Drake optimization as a ROS node? Could you point me to an example with an executable or explain what I need to consider in the CMakeLists.txt?
- Or should I use the default Bazel (or CMake) build system? If yes, how should I proceed? I saw that you provide a LCM publishing system. Can I transform those messages to ROS?
- I saw that a repository for the integration of ROS 2 exists https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake-ros/tree/main. Is there something similar for ROS 1?