ROS 2 support

[darkdragon-001]

Opening this issue to track progress. Follow up on ros-industrial-attic/ur_modern_driver#244

[fmauch]

Thanks for raising this. Let me quickly state that we currently don't have any specific plans to develop this, but I would be happy to assist in questions raised by anyone going for this.

[gavanderhoorn]

First thing to do probably would be to refactor ur_robot_driver into the ROS-agnostic library and the ROS package (ie: the driver). Then make the library a plain CMake package, which would make it easily consumable by both ROS 1 and ROS 2 packages.

Porting the driver (so not the library) to ROS 2 is complicated right now because of the lack of ros_control support in ROS 2.

There is work underway on that as well, but it's not usable right now.

[robinsonmm]

Based on the comments related to ros_control support limiting ROS2 driver development, has there been any update on adding ROS2 support relative to the UR driver?

MR

[gavanderhoorn]

I'll leave the details to @fmauch, but at least the refactor into separate library has been done/is in progress. See #266 and UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_Client_Library.

re: ros2_control: progress is being made (it's (partly) a ROSin FTP). Things are in flux right now though, so any effort would probably want to coordinate with the ros2_control devs.

[fmauch]

The library in UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_Client_Library should be ready to use, so if anyone wants to start building a ROS2 driver ontop of that, this should be working. The dev team from this driver currently still doesn't have any plans further following this.

[bharathra]

@fmauch Understand that currently you do not have plans to develop ROS2 drivers. In the long term, is ROS2 support on your roadmap? We are currently looking at productionizing couple of robot (UR10e) cells at our company and ROS2 support is critical. (Prototype cell is running via ROS bridge). Curious to know your long term roadmap for ROS2. Thank you.

[mahmoud-a-ali]

I am also interested to see ros2 driver for UR robots! Do you have any plans to support ROS2 in the future?

[marioney]

I agree, support for ROS2 will be very valuable, so I'm also interested on the roadmap for ROS2

[tckarenchiang]

Yes, as there are more and more ROS2 users, support for ROS2 is definitely worth consideration.

[robinsonmm]

Being that there seems to be interest, and within the ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas we have membership engagement on this topic, what would it take @fmauch to get it on the UR/FZI roadmap?

[davetcoleman]

+1 to a ROS 2 driver, PickNik's UR5 badly needs one to support development of the MoveIt 2 project!

[JStech]

Yes, please support ROS 2!

[mitchpryor]

ROS2 integration will be a must. Many of our collaborators are seeing ROS2 as a necessary upgrade to move systems from the lab to the field for a variety of good reasons.