How can I use Motoman stack with ROS Indigo?

edit

Edit 2015-04-22: updated as industrial_core has been released into Indigo.

(I'm assuming no prior ROS experience in this answer .. well, some experience)

While there hasn't been any official release of the motoman packages into Indigo, I've had good results building them from source. As far as I know there are no incompatibilities, but you obviously do this at your own risk.

You could do something like this (in your current catkin workspace):

cd /path/to/your/catkin_ws/src

# checkout the desired version of the motoman repository.
# if you'd rather use the development versions, use '-b hydro-devel' OR '-b indigo-devel'.
git clone -b hydro https://github.com/ros-industrial/motoman.git

# we need to make sure you have all dependencies installed.
# this step should install 'industrial_robot_client' for you
cd ..
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro indigo

# now build
catkin_make

This should successfully build the Motoman ROS nodes. You'll still have to set up your controller, but those steps are identical to the Hydro version (see motoman_driver/Tutorials on the ROS wiki).

To make sure things are ok, try running the tests:

catkin_make run_tests

then

catkin_test_results --all build/

The summary should show 0 failures. Especially the tests for simple_message, industrial_robot_client and all of the motoman_X_support packages are important.

Now after a source /path/to/your/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash, you should be able to start the relevant launch files.