ABB Experimental

ROS-Industrial ABB experimental meta-package. See the ROS wiki page for more information.

Contents

This repository contains packages that will be migrated to the abb repository after they have received sufficient testing. The contents of these packages are subject to change, without prior notice. Any available APIs are to be considered unstable and are not guaranteed to be complete and / or functional.

Branch naming follows the ROS distribution they are compatible with. -devel branches may be unstable.

Naming Convention

All robot support packages and MoveIt configurations follow the naming conventions as described in REP-I0007.

Installation

As this repository contains experimental packages, no binary packages are available.

Instead, follow the instructions to build them in a Catkin workspace shown in the next section.

Building

On newer (or older) versions of ROS

Building the packages on newer (or older) versions of ROS is in most cases possible and supported. For example: building the packages in this repository on Ubuntu Xenial/ROS Kinetic or 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. All packages can be built using catkin_make however: use catkin_make in place of catkin build where appropriate.

Building the packages

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.

These instructions build the kinetic-devel branch on a ROS Kinetic system:

# change to the root of the Catkin workspace
$ cd $HOME/catkin_ws

# retrieve the latest development version of the abb repository. If you'd rather
# use the latest released version, replace 'kinetic-devel' with 'kinetic'
$ git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/abb.git src/abb
# retrieve the latest development version of abb_experimental
$ git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/abb_experimental.git src/abb_experimental

# check build dependencies. Note: this may install additional packages,
# depending on the software installed on the machine
$ rosdep update

# be sure to change 'kinetic' to whichever ROS release you are using
$ rosdep install --from-paths src/ --ignore-src --rosdistro kinetic

# build the workspace (using catkin_tools)
$ catkin build

Activating the workspace

Finally, activate the workspace to get access to the packages just built:

$ source $HOME/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

At this point all packages should be usable (ie: roslaunch should be able to auto-complete package names starting with abb_..). In case the workspace contains additional packages (ie: not from this repository), those should also still be available.

Installation and usage

Refer to Working With ROS-Industrial Robot Support Packages for information on how to use the files provided by the robot support and MoveIt configuration packages. See also the other pages on the ROS wiki.

Refer to the tutorials for information on installation and configuration of the controller-specific software components.

ROS-Industrial is a community project. We welcome contributions from any source, from those who are extremely active to casual users. The following sections outline the steps on how to contribute to ROS-Industrial. It assumes there is an existing repository to which one would like to contribute (item 1 in the figure above) and one is familiar with the Git “Fork and Branch” workflow, detailed here.

1. Before any development is undertaken, a contributor would communicate a need and/or issue to the ROS-Industrial community. This can be done by submitting an issue on the appropriate GitHub repo, the issues repo, or by posting a message in the ROS-Industrial category on ROS Discourse. . Doing so may save you time if similar development is underway and ensure that whatever approach you take is acceptable to the community of reviewers once it is submitted.
2. The second step (item 2) is to implement your change. If you are working on a code contribution, we highly recommend you utilize the ROS Qt-Creator Plug-in. Verify that your change successfully builds and passes all tests.
3. Next, push your changes to a “feature” branch in your personal fork of the repo and issue a pull request (PR)(item 3). The PR allows maintainers to review the submitted code. Before the PR can be accepted, the maintainer and contributor must agree that the contribution is implemented appropriately. This process can take several back-and-forth steps (see example). Contributors should expect to spend as much time reviewing/changing the code as on the initial implementation. This time can be minimized by communicating with the ROS-Industrial community before any contribution is made.
4. Issuing a Pull Request (PR) triggers the Travis Continuous Integrations (CI) step (item 4) which happens automatically in the background. The Travis CI performs several operations, and if any of the steps below fail, then the PR is marked accordingly for the maintainer.
   • Travis Workflow:
   • Installs a barebones ROS distribution on a fresh Ubuntu virtual machine.
   • Creates a catkin workspace and puts the repository in it.
   • Uses wstool to check out any from-source dependencies (i.e. other repositories).
   • Resolves package dependencies using rosdep (i.e. install packages using apt-get).
   • Compiles the catkin workspace.
   • Runs all available unit tests.
5. If the PR passes Travis CI and one of the maintainers is satisfied with the changes, they post a +1 as a comment on the PR (item 5). The +1 signifies that the PR is ready to be merged. All PRs require at least one +1 and pass Travis CI before it can be merged.
6. The next step (item 6) is for the PR to be merged into the main branch. This is done through the GitHub web interface by selecting the “Merge pull request” button. After the PR is merged, all status badges are updated automatically.
7. Periodically, the maintainer will release the package (item 7), which then gets sent to the ROS Build Farm for Debian creation.
8. The publishing of the released packages (item 8) is managed by OSRF and is not on a set schedule. This usually happens when all packages for a given distro are built successfully and stable. The current status for the distro kinetic can be found here . Navigating to other distros can be done by changing the distro name in the link.
9. Once the package has been published, it is available to be installed by the developer (item 9).
10. After the install of a new version, the developer may have questions, experience issues or it may not have the necessary functionality which should all be reported on the packages GitHub repository as an issue (item 10). If an issue is identified or there is missing functionality that the developer requires, the cycle starts back at (item 2).

For more details, please refer to the ROS-I wiki.

Licensing

Any contribution that you make to this repository will be under the Apache 2 License, as dictated by that license:

5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise,
   any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work
   by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of
   this License, without any additional terms or conditions.
   Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify
   the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed
   with Licensor regarding such Contributions.