Overview

This package contains the ROS driver for Universal Robots robotic arms from the CB3- or e-Series.

Compatibility

Polyscope up to v1.8.x

This package does not support CB2 controllers.

For robots with Polyscope v1.8.x or older, please see whether ur_modern_driver is sufficient.

Polyscope v3.x and v5.x

Make sure the controller runs v3.7 or newer for CB3, or v5.1 or newer for e-Series controllers.

Feature

• Works for all CB3 (with software version >= 3.7) and e-Series (software >= 5.1) robots and uses the RTDE interface for communication, whenever possible.

• Factory calibration of the robot inside ROS to reach Cartesian targets precisely.
• Realtime-enabled communication structure to robustly cope with the 2ms cycle time of the e-Series. To use this, compile and run it on a kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch enabled. (See the Real-time setup guide on how to achieve this)
• Transparent integration of the teach-pendant. Using the URCaps system, a program is running on the robot that handles control commands sent from ROS side. With this, the robot can be paused, stopped and resumed without restarting the ROS driver. This will in the future also enable the usage of ROS-components as part of a more complex UR-program on the teach pendant. ROS-control of the robot can be quit using a service call to continue program execution on the TP.
• Use the robot's speed-scaling. When speed scaling is active due to safety constraints or the speed slider is used, this gets correctly handled on the ROS side, as well slowing down trajectory execution accordingly.

  Note: Other ros-controllers based on a position interface can be used with this driver, but may behave wrong if the speed slider isn't set to 100% or if speed scaling slows down the robot. Also, the pausing function can only be used if the default scaled trajectory controller is used.

• ROS-Service-based replacement of most every-day TP-interactions offer using UR robots without interacting with the teach pendant at all, if desired. The robot can be started, stopped and even recovery from safety events can be done using ROS service- and action calls. See the driver's dashboard services and the robot_state_helper node for details.

Additional information

Most documentation is handled inside the Githhub README files.

Contributing

Use GitHub to report bugs or submit feature requests. [View active issues]