Revision history [back]

You give us very little information / context. In addition, the question "can ROS do X" is too vague: there are many pkgs in ROS and not all of them provide the same (level of) functionality or support the same features.

As a comment on your question: yes, provided that:

you use a driver component that either supports this directly, or,
provides sufficient control bandwidth to implement this from joint space, and
use a trajectory generating component that generates Cartesian trajectories

Edit:

I want to build and use a robotics arm with 6-7dof and a tool attacth to it on the last link. It can be e.g. a grinding, painting or welding tool, able to process the surface of a workpiece by controling the movement of the tool between viapoints. Any sugestens that can get me on the right path?

This seems like a true xy-problem.

Yes, this is possible. Not trivial though. See this video fi. The software that was used can be found at ros-industrial-consortium/godel.

But realise that this does much more than simply executing a bunch of linear motions (there are actually very few linear motions in that video): it automatically scans a scene, detects surfaces, plans process paths and executes them with obstacle avoidance.

holding a constant TCP speed?

As to this specific requirement: that is harder, and will probably require creating a Cartesian controller or finding one.

Not much work is done like this as motion planners typically used in ROS typically plan in joint space.

If you are looking for something similar to the FANUC TP language, then that doesn't exist afaik. There have been some efforst in the past, but I don't think they lead to something in the end. See #q283428 for some more discussion.

Edit2:

Thank you for the links to godel. My daily work is much like in this project. but we mostly paint parts that we 3d-scan, segment, pathplan, motionplan, and generate robot programs. I look at ROS now, and want to learn, because I expect it one day will be capable as a replacement of our old platforms

Continuous robotic processes are typically much alike. Blending is removal, painting is additive, but the basic principles are the same.

The same software is also being used for paint removal and painting itself.