Universal Robots Client Library

A C++ library for accessing Universal Robots interfaces. With this library C++-based drivers can be implemented in order to create external applications leveraging the versatility of Universal Robots robotic manipulators.

The library has no external dependencies besides the standard C++ libraries such as ROS, or boost to make it easy to integrate and maintain. It also serves as the foundation for the ROS and ROS 2 drivers.

Requirements

• Polyscope (The software running on the robot controller) version 3.14.3 (for CB3-Series), or 5.9.4 (for e-Series) or higher. If you use an older Polyscope version it is suggested to update your robot. If for some reason (please tell us in the issues why) you cannot upgrade your robot, please see the version compatibility table for a compatible tag.
• The library requires an implementation of POSIX threads such as the pthread library
• Socket communication is currently based on Linux sockets. Thus, this library will require Linux for building and using.
• The master branch of this repository requires a C++17-compatible compiler. For building this library without a C++17-requirement, please use the boost branch instead that requires the boost library.

Build instructions

See Build / installation

License

The majority of this library is licensed under the Apache-2.0 licensed. However, certain parts are licensed under different licenses:

• The queue used inside the communication structures is originally written by Cameron Desrochers and is released under the BSD-2-Clause license.
• The semaphore implementation used inside the queue implementation is written by Jeff Preshing and licensed under the zlib license

While the main LICENSE file in this repository contains the Apache-2.0 license used for the majority of the work, the respective libraries of third-party components reside together with the code imported from those third parties.

Library contents

Currently, this library contains the following components:

• Basic primary interface: The primary interface isn’t fully implemented at the current state and provides only basic functionality. See A word on the primary / secondary interface for further information about the primary interface.
• RTDE interface: The RTDE interface is fully supported by this library. See RTDEClient for further information on how to use this library as an RTDE client.
• Dashboard interface: The Dashboard server can be accessed directly from C++ through helper functions using this library.
• Custom motion streaming: This library was initially developed as part of the Universal Robots ROS driver. Therefore, it also contains a mechanism to do data streaming through a custom socket, e.g. to perform motion command streaming.

Example driver

In the examples subfolder you will find a minimal example of a running driver. It starts an instance of the UrDriver class and prints the RTDE values read from the controller. To run it make sure to

• have an instance of a robot controller / URSim running at the configured IP address (or adapt the address to your needs)
• run it from the package’s main folder (the one where this README.md file is stored), as for simplicity reasons it doesn’t use any sophisticated method to locate the required files.

Architecture

See Architecture documentation

A word on the primary / secondary interface

Currently, this library doesn’t support the primary interface very well, as the Universal Robots ROS driver was built mainly upon the RTDE interface. The PrimaryClient for directly accessing the primary interface doesn’t support all features of the primary interface.

The comm::URStream class can be used to open a connection to the primary / secondary interface and send data to it. The producer/consumer pipeline structure can also be used together with the primary / secondary interface. However, package parsing isn’t implemented for most packages currently. See the primary_pipeline example on details how to set this up. Note that when running this example, most packages will just be printed as their raw byte streams in a hex notation, as they aren’t implemented in the library, yet.

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Changelog for package ur_client_library

2.0.0 (2025-04-16)

• Add functionality to send MoveP and MoveC instructions to the robot (#303)
• Fix naming issues (#307)
• Add more tests for start_ursim.sh (#305)
• [start_ursim.sh] Use direct web pages instead of GitHub API to download URCap (#308)
• Fix typo in freedrive example document (#304)
• Always download and install the latest URCap(X) if not present (#301)
• Document robot setup for PolyScope X (#302)
• Bump bats-core/bats-action from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 (#300)
• Polyscope x integration tests (#295)
• Contributors: Felix Exner, dependabot[bot], xndcn

1.9.0 (2025-03-28)

• Make start_ursim.sh support polyscopex (#294)
• Reduce usage of dashboard client in tests and examples (#296)
• Try catch RTDE setup (#285)
• add missing headers (#290)
• PrimaryClient: Add methods to unlock protective stop and stop the program (#292)
• Set increased timeout in dashboard client test (#293)
• Do not print a warning when querying the dashboard server for a running program (#287)
• Primary client power on (#289)
• Contributors: Andrei Kholodnyi, Dominic Reber, Felix Exner

1.8.0 (2025-03-17)

• Remove unused variables (#288)
• Remove direct primary and secondary stream from UrDriver (#283)
• Configure gcovr to ignore negative hits as errors (#284)
• Add an explicit CMake option to turn on/off integration tests (#282)
• instruction_executor: Allow canceling an instruction (#281)
• instruction_executor: fix movel test (#280)
• Fix buffer order of acceleration and velocity (#279)
• Support compilation on Windows (#229)
• Contributors: Felix Exner, VDm

1.7.1 (2025-02-25)

• Fix trajectory result in trajectory forward mode when no trajectory is running (#276)
• Remove sending an idle command in quintic spline test (#275)
• In servo mode always allow targets close to current pose (#273)
• Contributors: Felix Exner

1.7.0 (2025-02-19)

• Make UrDriver tests run without ctest (#270)
• UrDriver: Send program in headless mode after creating trajectory and script_command servers (#271)
• Improve limit check (#256)
• Use colored log output and timestamps in default log handler (#267)
• Parametrize reconnection time for UrDriver (#266) Co-authored-by: Dominic Reber <<71256590+domire8@users.noreply.github.com>>
• Fix DashboardClient load program from subdir (#269)
• Increase dashboard timeout in ExampleRobotWrapper to 10s
• Disable internal deprecation warning
• Use a config struct for initializing UrDriver (#264)
• Use ExampleRobotWrapper for initialization in all examples

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