ABB Experimental

ROS-Industrial ABB experimental meta-package. See the ROS wiki page for more information.

Contents

This repository contains packages that will be migrated to the abb repository after they have received sufficient testing. The contents of these packages are subject to change, without prior notice. Any available APIs are to be considered unstable and are not guaranteed to be complete and / or functional.

Branch naming follows the ROS distribution they are compatible with. -devel branches may be unstable.

Naming Convention

All robot support packages and MoveIt configurations follow the naming conventions as described in REP-I0007.

Installation

As this repository contains experimental packages, no binary packages are available.

Instead, follow the instructions to build them in a Catkin workspace shown in the next section.

Building

On newer (or older) versions of ROS

Building the packages on newer (or older) versions of ROS is in most cases possible and supported. For example: building the packages in this repository on Ubuntu Xenial/ROS Kinetic or Ubuntu Bionic/ROS Melodic systems is supported. This will require creating a Catkin workspace, cloning this repository, installing all required dependencies and finally building the workspace.

Catkin tools

It is recommended to use catkin_tools instead of the default catkin when building ROS workspaces. catkin_tools provides a number of benefits over regular catkin_make and will be used in the instructions below. All packages can be built using catkin_make however: use catkin_make in place of catkin build where appropriate.

Building the packages

The following instructions assume that a Catkin workspace has been created at $HOME/catkin_ws and that the source space is at $HOME/catkin_ws/src. Update paths appropriately if they are different on the build machine.

These instructions build the kinetic-devel branch on a ROS Kinetic system:

# change to the root of the Catkin workspace
$ cd $HOME/catkin_ws

# retrieve the latest development version of the abb repository. If you'd rather
# use the latest released version, replace 'kinetic-devel' with 'kinetic'
$ git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/abb.git src/abb
# retrieve the latest development version of abb_experimental
$ git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/abb_experimental.git src/abb_experimental

# check build dependencies. Note: this may install additional packages,
# depending on the software installed on the machine
$ rosdep update

# be sure to change 'kinetic' to whichever ROS release you are using
$ rosdep install --from-paths src/ --ignore-src --rosdistro kinetic

# build the workspace (using catkin_tools)
$ catkin build

Activating the workspace

Finally, activate the workspace to get access to the packages just built:

$ source $HOME/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

At this point all packages should be usable (ie: roslaunch should be able to auto-complete package names starting with abb_..). In case the workspace contains additional packages (ie: not from this repository), those should also still be available.

Installation and usage

Refer to Working With ROS-Industrial Robot Support Packages for information on how to use the files provided by the robot support and MoveIt configuration packages. See also the other pages on the ROS wiki.

Refer to the tutorials for information on installation and configuration of the controller-specific software components.