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Supported Hardware

It is the goal of the ROS-Industrial program to provide ROS interfaces to many different kinds of industrial equipment, including PLCs, Robot Controllers, Servos, Human Machine Interfaces, IO Networks, etc. As these interfaces become available, they will be documented here.

Industrial Robots

The table below summarizes level of support for various robot interfaces. All interfaces make use of commercially available options (although the required options may be available at additional cost). Because each vendor exposes different functional interfaces, the capability of each can differ. This is noted where significant limitations are present. For more detailed information please see the associated stack/package documentation.

Definitions

Position Streaming

Joint positions are streamed to the controller. Move velocity is fixed by the controller. (This method is often the easiest to set up because much of the controller interpolation is maintained)

Trajectory Downloading

A full trajectory of joint positions is downloaded to the controller. The trajectory includes velocity contstraints which are adhered to by the controller

Trajectory Streaming

This is very similar to Position Streaming, except that trajectory velocity constraints are adhered to by the controller

Torque Control

Direct torque commands are sent to the controller. This is a real-time interface (not yet supported within ROS)

Arm Nav. Pkg

Robot specific geometry must be defined in an assoicatiated arm navigation package. This information is used for path planning purposes and collision checking. While these are created for each robot model, they must be recreated for entire robot cells (This is not difficult, see this tutorial)>>

Supported Hardware Table

Vendor

Controller(s)

Position
Streaming

Trajectory
Downloading

Trajectory
Streaming

Torque
Control

Manipulator

Arm Nav.
Pkg

Motoman

DX100

YES 1

NO

NO

NO

SIA10D

YES

SIA20D

YES

Other DX 100
Compatible

NO 2

Adept

CX, CS

YES 3

NO

NO

NO

Viper 650

YES

Grippers

No industrial-specific gripper drivers are provided in the Electric release. Gripper control can be manually implemented using raw EtherCAT I/O as described below.

IO Networks

Networked input/output are commonly found in industrial applications. Support for these specialized networks within ROS-Industrial does not exist. However, outside stacks are available. We recommend the Simple Open EtherCAT Master stack. See implementation notes.

Notes

  1. Limited to <20% speed (1)

  2. User must generate packages (2)

  3. Limited to <70% speed (3)


2022-05-28 12:19