Is ROS able to support SDA10D industrial robot? When?

answered 2012-02-18 06:26:06 -0500

sedwards
1601 ●28 ●43 ●61 http://rosindustrial.swri.edu/

There isn't any plan to support the dual arm robots. However, several people have expressed interest and this is something that the ROS-Industrial developers would like to support. The development effort to support the dual arm robots is probably a small, but non-trivial effort. I am guessing, but I believe we have enough tools and libraries to do it. Unfortunately, the ROS-Industrial developers do not have access to the hardware and don't have a good knowledge of the controller architecture. I would suggest the following:

Let motoman know that this is something you would like. The more times they hear ROS and ROS-Industrial the better. Who knows, they might provide some support for developing the dual arm drivers.
If you have access to the dual arm hardware, you might be in the best position to develop this code yourself (that's probably not the answer you want to hear). If you are interested I recommend that you join the ROS-Industrial developers group ( https://groups.google.com/group/swri-ros-pkg-dev?hl=en_US )

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Thank you for inviting me to join your group. I'm not sure now my lab can have one or not. So I want to ask if my lab can have SDA10D in the future, how can I help you?

sam ( 2012-02-20 05:34:56 -0500 )edit

I am not familiar with the dual arm architecture but one obvious difference comes to mind. The single arm controller has a limitation of 12 axes. A dual arm setup would have at least 14. This difference would have to be handled at the driver level. This may require a completely different driver for the dual arm setup.

sedwards ( 2012-02-20 14:07:35 -0500 )edit

Thank you for detail explanation. What I know is SIA10D in ROS have the DX100 device driver which can support up to 8 robots/72 axes. What's the limitation of 12 axes? Does it not support by DX100 72 axes?

sam ( 2012-02-21 18:38:50 -0500 )edit

The 12 axes limit comes from the Motoplus software libraries (Motoplus is a development environment that allows c/c++ code to be compiled and ran directly on the controller). Joint positions are limited to 12 joints. They probably treat each arm as a separate robot. In that case we might have to add a robot ID to the joint position that is sent from ROS.

sedwards ( 2012-02-22 11:19:45 -0500 )edit

So it doesn't need to rewrite device driver,right? What will happen when join ROS industrial develop group? Do I need SDA10D robot before join? Thank you~

sam ( 2012-02-26 00:28:40 -0500 )edit

Anybody with interest is welcome to join the ROS-Industrial developers group. I would invite you to join whether you have hardware or not. At the very least, your knowledge about the motoman platform will be useful. The ROS-Industrial effort is still in it's startup phase, so I'm not sure what direction it will ultimately take. Of course, thats the best part of being involved at the beginning.

sedwards ( 2012-02-26 14:41:18 -0500 )edit

As for requiring a driver rewrite, the current one will not work as is. I imagine with some small modifications, we could get single arm motion to work. Simultaneous moves might be more difficult, but thats because I'm not sure how multiple arms are moved at the INFORM level.

sedwards ( 2012-02-26 14:43:35 -0500 )edit

My lab are goint to contact with yaskawa for SDA robot. I'm not quite sure we can have one or not. I think simultaneous moves would not be problem because DX100 control can control several robot at the same time. And what is INFORM level? Thank you~

sam ( 2012-03-01 14:21:15 -0500 )edit

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