Mitsubishi RV-6SDL Robot

Clive wrote:

Are you aware of this and is it useful

I have been in contact with this guy, machinekoder.com/machinekit-ros-industrial-robot/ , I am sure he is the guy who has developed the Tormach robot software. Would be pretty awesome if they release it all as open source.

Yes this has been posted a number of times lately:

e.g. here: forum.linuxcnc.org/pathpilot/40935-pathpilot-robot#192809

Would be pretty awesome if they release it all as open source.

I somehow don't think that's going to happen as this seems to be a business setup. But really, interfacing ROS and LinuxCNC _should_ not be that much of a job for somebody who is well versed in programming. Unfortunately I'm not a proficient programmer.

The other thing I notice is that there is not all that much of a user community when it comes to robots. Sure a lot of people find it a cool thing to look at but when it comes to actually having a use for it that would make it worth putting some effort into the field becomes fairly lonely. Even in my case it just came as an opportunity to play with something that I always found fascinating but having now a more or less working robot using LCNC makes me wonder what to actually DO with the thing. For a while I was thinking of machine tending and parts handling at a friends shop but that would only make sense for jobs with hundreds of more or less identical parts and those are fairly rare.
To be able to do that, automatic chuck and vise operation plus automatic opening of the machine enclosure is needed as well as an interface to synchronize gcode running on the machine and code running on the robot. All this can be done in LCNC but trying to interface with a commercial machine might not be that easy and the whole idea is only worth pursuing if it can run autonomously for long enough to save on labour. Just look at the pricing of used robot arms _without_ working controllers.
So really it's a lot of effort and money to spend on something that is actually a difficult thing to give a useful thing to do. Once we move away from high volume manufacturing what is there for a robot like mine to do?

Weren't you working on a welding robot?

Yeah my robots will be used for welding. I am in a fortunate position that I manage a medium sized fabrication business and I have multiple jobs that my robots can do. I am finished a bunch of other projects at the moment and when I am done will focus on my robots.

My next goal is for one robot to pick parts from a drum and placing them in position to be welded. Then another robot weld them and the first robot will then place them into a finished part drum and then start over. Also another project is setting multiple robot to weld large items up to 18 meters long.

I have in the past looked at ROS Industrial and seen features like scan and plan. Which is suppose to be able to scan an object and generate a moment path without operator intervention. In the future I plan to spend a bit of time seeing it I can get it to work for my applications.

And yeah robots are a lonely endeavor. Not many people have any experience with them since they are highly proprietary and very costly.

Interfacing ros to linuxcnc is either a major pain or a simple affair. If all you need is real time motion loop then it's just a python component that publishes joint targets from ros to Hal pins that are then connected to motors(or pid loops). If you want to use the built in lcnc motion planner then it gets really tricky since linuxcnc hasnt implemented a proper api for its use.

ROS has far superior motion planner and kinematics solver so if would be preferable to use those. There's also an api for ROS and moveit framework called pilz_robot_programming that abstracts a lot of the movement specifics and gives you simple LIN, PTP and CIRC commands and world frames to command a robot. Like a Kuka or other industrial robot controllers. I've built a code parser and gui on top of that, though it's still unfinished.

Machinekit has better facilities for this but it's essentially a work project for a couple guys and has no documentation whatsoever so it's a bitch to try and set up.

Roiki wrote:

Interfacing ros to linuxcnc is either a major pain or a simple affair.

Someone has already done the work to link LinuxCNC to ROS, I found this a few years ago when I was doing some research, github.com/tomlarkworthy/linuxCNC_ROS

I've built a code parser and gui on top of that, though it's still unfinished.

Is there a chance you could share what you have so far, I would be interested in having a look.

quote="thefabricator03" post=193413]

Roiki wrote:

Interfacing ros to linuxcnc is either a major pain or a simple affair.

Someone has already done the work to link LinuxCNC to ROS, I found this a few years ago when I was doing some research, github.com/tomlarkworthy/linuxCNC_ROS

I've built a code parser and gui on top of that, though it's still unfinished.

Is there a chance you could share what you have so far, I would be interested in having a look.[/quote]

Yea you're not going to use 9 year old code. Also that's just linking an image processing to ROS. Nothing to do with movement whatsoever. Aside from the machinekit implementation(which is not documented) I haven't found anyone that used ros and linuxcnc to control a robot. It's just a headache of a greater magnitude because linuxcnc isn't built for that at all. You can make a passable controller from linuxcnc alone but it shows its not designed for it. And it doesn't play nicely with others.

I need to see what I have left of the code. It was a monolithic pyqt app that I was in the process of breaking into ros nodes and services. I switched work laptops last month and may have forgotten to save my work from that machine. ?

I was going to make it open source anyway but covid got in the way so I haven't touched it for almost a year. I'll see if I can find what I have.

Edit: I found this one, which is the code parser section. Large chunks are missing and I don't think it's functional but it should give you an idea what I was making: github.com/Roiki11/robot_touch/blob/master/move.py
Here's the api documentation: github.com/PilzDE/pilz_industrial_motion...ogramming/Readme.rst

@thefabricator
I just had a look at that github repo. To me it looks like some experiment using a camera and extracting coordinates but I fail to find any clue as to how they connected ROS to LCNC. Really I can't find any reference to LCNC except in the title. Do you have any more info?

@Roiki
Thanks for the info. I played a bit with ROS interfacing to my other robot. Point-To-Point operation worked fine. However I wonder how one would implement something that needs more control over the motion path like welding a pipe joint. Also in order to incorporate LCNC's motion planner I would imagine one had to use it's GCode? Does ROS have a realtime component?

I found Toms thread, forum.linuxcnc.org/10-advanced-configura...rating-system-opencv

Also this blog post shows how the Machinekit ROS integration works, machinekoder.com/machinekit-ros-open-source-robots/

I found Toms thread, forum.linuxcnc.org/10-advanced-configura...rating-system-opencv

Looks like this was a rather short lived discussion.