AUBO Robot Driver

• A new driver for the aubo_i3/aubo_i5/aubo_i7/aubo_i10 robot arms from AUBO robots.
  
• It is designed to replace the old driver (For robot controller software version < V4), while solving some issues, improving usability as well as enabling compatibility of ros_control.

Features

• You can control the robot by using both teach pendant(through AUBO API) and MoveIt.
  When lauching the driver node, the default controller is ros-controller, when you want to switch to the robot-controller, you should publish a message, like:
  

  rostopic pub -1 aubo_driver/controller_switch std_msgs/Int32 -- 0
  

The last argument mean the robot is controlled by robot-controller, when you want to go back to ros-controller, just change the value “0” to “1”.

• The driver maintain some of the same functionality as the previous aubo_driver:

  • Action interface on /follow_joint_trajectory for seamless integration with MoveIt.

  • Publishes robot joint state on /joint_states

  • Publishes IO state on /aubo_driver/io_states

  • Service call to set outputs.

• Added support for ros_control.

  • As ros_control wants to have control over the robot at all times, ros_control compatibility is set via a parameter at launch-time.
  • With ros_control active, the driver doesn’t open the action_lib interface. This is handled by ros_control instead.
  • Currently one controller is available, controlling the joint position of the robot, useable for trajectroy execution.

Installation

• As the driver communicates with the robot via ethernet and depends on reliable continous communication, it is not possible to reliably control a AUBO Robot from a virtual machine.

• Just clone the repository into your catkin working directory and make it with catkin_make.

• Note that this package depends on aubo_msgs, hardware_interface, and controller_manager so it cannot directly be used with ROS versions for indigo and kinetic.

Usage

roslaunch robot_name_moveit_config robot_name_moveit_planning_executing.launch
roslaunch robot_name_moveit_config moveit_rviz.launch config:=true

There is a parameter named "/aubo_controller/velocity_scale_factor", you can use it to sacle the velocity of the trajectory. The bigger the parameter is, faster the robot will move.

Test

• tsetIO: The message of topic /aubo_driver/io_states is published at a rate of 100Hz. To set IO states, you need to establish a ServiceClient to call servive on /aubo_driver/set_io
• testAuboAPI: There are plenty of functionality you can use to control the robot, see this declaration. If you want to control the robot more efficiency, it is recommanded to use the Aubo API to realize the functions.

Changelog for package aubo_driver

1.3.3 (2018-08-01)

1.3.2 (2018-07-31)