Revision history [back]

You should be able to use the UR5 in Fuerte. The driver on the github repo may work, but it's development has been focused on post groovy. You might want to try the old kforge repo for fuerte (just to be sure) hg https://kforge.ros.org/ros_industrial/universal_robot.

The UR driver package supports the joint trajectory action interface directly. I would recommend using the arm_navigation package to get started. Here is a nice tutorial that tells you how to get started for a generic robot: http://wiki.ros.org/Industrial/Tutorials/Create_a_Arm_Nav_Pkg_for_an_Industrial_Robot

To get a "real" UR to work with the arm navigation package, you will need to modify some of the generated launch files and start the driver node (see the bottom of the tutorial for general instructions). The most common issue I have seen is remapping the joint trajectory action from where arm navigation expects it to the driver action.