Is braking supported?

[poorboy44]

I'm trying to figure out if braking is supported. I would like the default behavior ("no signal") to be full brake. This is for safety in case my robot is on a hill, etc. However, looking at the morph_hw code I am not seeing any braking member functions. Do you know if braking is currently supported, or I need to implement it?

[roaldlemmens]

Currently there's no braking implementation. In morph_hw.cpp there's a check if there's a velocity set (if (_cmd[0] != 0.0)), in the else of the check the motor is release ( _left_wheel_driver.releaseMotor();). This has the benefit of being able to manually move the robot and save battery. Ideally a safetycontroller would be implemented which would use the VESC braking when needed. For instance combined with IMU data. Another option would be to implement braking instead of releasing by default when requested speed is 0. It would be nice if this could be configured (using ros dynamic reconfigure) to change the behaviour, for instance when you want to release the motors to move the robot manually.