abb_driver

[ROS-Industrial][] RAPID based driver for ABB IRC5 controllers.

Contents

This repository contains a simple, RAPID based ROS driver for ABB industrial robots connected to IRC5 controllers.

The driver is largely manipulator agnostic, and is expected to work with any ABB manipulator compatible with an IRC5 controller.

For more information, refer to the [ROS wiki][].

Note: this is not a new development, but a migration of the old abb_driver package to a separate repository. See Origin and history for more information.

TOC

1. Status
2. Performance
3. Requirements
4. Releases and supported ROS distributions
5. Installation
6. Building from source
7. Usage
8. Origin and history

Status

This package is usable as-is, but is not feature complete. Only joint motion can be commanded and there is no support for IO, Cartesian motion or any other more advanced RAPID functionality.

No significant development is planned, as focus has shifted to [abb_robot_driver][] (with [abb_libegm][] and [abb_librws][]).

Community contributed usability enhancements and new features will however be accepted and merged.

Performance

Performance of the driver (of both the ROS and RAPID components) is deemed sufficient for mildly dynamic workloads (ie: pick-and-place and relatively slow motion). Processes for which control of the robot’s position and velocity must achieve high resolution in both time and space are not supported by this driver.

Users are encouraged to consider using [abb_libegm][] and [abb_librws][] instead.

Requirements

Please refer to the [ROS wiki][] for information on supported controllers, required RobotWare versions and required controller options.

Releases and supported ROS distributions

This repository follows the main [abb][] repository as far as development and maintenance policies, branching strategies and release scheduling. Branch naming follows the ROS distribution they are compatible with. -devel branches may be unstable.

abb_driver has been successfully built from sources with both ROS Kinetic and ROS Melodic, on Ubuntu Xenial and Ubuntu Bionic respectively. Only amd64 architectures have been tested. Other combinations of OS, ROS versions and architectures may work, but have not been tested.

Binary packages are provided for ROS Kinetic and ROS Melodic on all platforms supported by the ROS buildfarm for those ROS releases. Refer to [REP 3: Target Platforms][], Kinetic Kame and Melodic Morenia sections for more information on which platforms are supported.

Installation

On Ubuntu, installation via apt is recommended over building the package from source.

For ROS Melodic, the following command installs the driver and all of its dependencies (after having configured the ROS package repositories):

sudo apt install ros-melodic-abb-driver

When using ROS Kinetic, replace melodic with kinetic.

Instructions to build the driver from source, refer to the next section.

Building from source

On newer (or older) versions of ROS

Building abb_driver on Ubuntu Xenial/ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu Bionic/ROS Melodic systems is supported. This will require creating a Catkin workspace, cloning this repository, installing all required dependencies and finally building the workspace.

Catkin tools

It is recommended to use [catkin_tools][] instead of the default [catkin][] when building ROS workspaces. catkin_tools provides a number of benefits over regular catkin_make and will be used in the instructions below. The package can be built using catkin_make however: use catkin_make in place of catkin build where appropriate.

Building the package

The following instructions assume that a [Catkin workspace][] has been created at $HOME/catkin_ws and that the source space is at $HOME/catkin_ws/src. Update paths appropriately if they are different on the build machine.

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