ROS2 Differential Drive Robot

A working ROS2 Jazzy implementation for controlling a differential drive robot with encoder feedback.

For C Arduino code check: https://github.com/rainingmp3/ros_arduino_bridge For related simulation work in Gazebo check: https://github.com/rainingmp3/differential_drive

Demo

robot.mov

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 4B
• Arduino Nano (clone)
• L298N motor driver
• IR encoders
• 4× AA batteries

Challenges

Getting ros2_control working on real hardware is notoriously difficult:

• Fragmented documentation - Information is scattered across multiple ROS2 distributions with breaking changes between versions
• Complex debugging - Issues can originate from hardware, firmware, drivers, or any layer of the ros2_control stack
• Large codebase - Tracing problems through controllers, hardware interfaces, and lifecycle management is time-consuming
• Simultaneous failures - Hardware and software issues often occur together, making root cause analysis challenging

This repository provides a complete, tested implementation for the hardware mentioned above with ROS2 Jazzy.

Credits

This project combines work from:

• Josh Newans - hardware package (hardware interface and Arduino code)
• Edouard Renard - all other packages (basic structure of the project, main configuration and bringup files)
• Aleksandar Haber - hardware assembly

Resources

• Josh Newans YouTube Series
• Edouard Renard's YouTube Channel
• Aleksandar Haber PhD YouTube
• ROS2 Control Documentation
• ros2_control_demos
• Buy list, electronics, etc.

Status

• Differential drive control working
• Encoder feedback integrated
• Tested on real hardware
• Polishing
• Tuning
• Combining low level control with higher level navigation
• Behavior trees, obstacle avoidance, and general "higher level" tasks