How to use a real robot in moveit

[Joris Beuls]

Dear community

I have been looking around about how to connect my real robot to moveit. I can only find tutorials about ROS Industrial [1][2]. Is it possible to use the method from [1] in normal ROS?
Does anyone have a tutorial about normal ROS?

Some more info about trajectories[3]

Kind regards
Joris

[1] http://wiki.ros.org/Industrial/Tutorials/Create_a_MoveIt_Pkg_for_an_Industrial_Robot#Required_Topics.2BAC8-Services
[2] http://answers.ros.org/question/192739/implement-moveit-on-real-robot/
[3] http://moveit.ros.org/wiki/Executing_Trajectories_with_MoveIt

[G.A. vd. Hoorn - 3ME]

On 07/05/15 11:06, Joris Beuls wrote:
> Dear community

Joris,

I don't know if you've solved this already, but here are some remarks I
think could clarify some things for you.

> I have been looking around about how to connect my real robot to moveit. I
> can only find tutorials about ROS Industrial [1][2]. Is it possible to use
> the method from [1] in normal ROS?
> Does anyone have a tutorial about normal ROS?

It's important to remember / understand that there is no _technical_
difference between ROS and ROS-Industrial. One could say that ROS-I is
'just' a set of packages that happen to focus on supporting using ROS
with industrial robot controllers and other hardware. The type of
package you are after is a typically called a robot driver, and those
exist in both ROS and ROS-I. I hope you see now that asking for a
tutorial 'about normal ROS' is at least a little strange.

In order to be able to use your Epson controller with MoveIt, you will
have to find a way to communicate the JointTrajectories to it and report
back joint states and controller state. The tutorial you link ([1])
assumes you already have some way to do that in place, and assists you
in setting up your MoveIt configuration such that it can interact with
the nodes of your robot controller driver.

Afaik, there is no such driver for Epson controllers.

There has been some discussion on the ROS-Industrial mailinglist about a
driver for Epson controllers ([4]), but afaict, there has been no actual
development.

> Some more info about trajectories[3]
>
> Kind regards
> Joris

Gijs

> [1] http://wiki.ros.org/Industrial/Tutorials/Create_a_MoveIt_Pkg_for_an_Industrial_Robot#Required_Topics.2BAC8-Services
> [2] http://answers.ros.org/question/192739/implement-moveit-on-real-robot/
> [3] http://moveit.ros.org/wiki/Executing_Trajectories_with_MoveIt

[4]
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/swri-ros-pkg-dev/n4lt4nYCnds/Aj7gEoGNqJ4J

[Joris Beuls]

Thank you very much, sorry for the late response. I talked with some other researchers near here who work with ROS. They came to the same conclusion but didn't have a solution. I am currently trying to find a workaround using sockets and converting the ros messages in the motion planning program itself. Then i send the data to the robot software.

kind regards
Joris

[G.A. vd. Hoorn - 3ME]

My offer still stands: a ROS-Industrial driver for Epson controllers has
already seen some minimal development, and I could support you in
completing that work.

The reason I say this is because what you describe ("using sockets and
converting ros messages") is essentially what such a driver would be doing.


Gijs