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ros-industrial / industrial_core

ROS-Industrial core communication packages (http://wiki.ros.org/industrial_core)
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Native Robot I/O #27

Open shaun-edwards opened 11 years ago

shaun-edwards commented 11 years ago

This issue has been moved from: ros-industrial/ros_industrial_issues#2 (submitted by @clay-flannigan)

Native robot I/O should be supported through standard ROS-I interfaces. Most industrial controllers have built-in (embedded) I/O standard functions like fence-status, gripper-close, etc. They generally also support general purpose I/O. Exposing these I/O points would remove the requirement for separate networked I/O from the ROS PC.

liborw commented 11 years ago

We have already implemented an IO interface for motoman (DX100) robot. With bit of help we can make it more general.

The current implementation uses another simple message. The message is composed of pairs, IO address and command. Command represents reading, writing and read value (in case of reply from the controller).

gavanderhoorn commented 11 years ago

@liborw: is this code publicly accessible? I'm wondering if you considered (and how you dealt with) issues with consistency?

liborw commented 11 years ago

@gavanderhoorn: yes, the motoman side is here io_interface.[cpp,h], and the message is here io_data.[cpp,h]

shaun-edwards commented 11 years ago

@liborw, @gavanderhoorn, It seemed like this could be the start of a new feature discussion. Was there any resolution on this. This is definitely a feature of interest to a lot of users, but we (SwRI) doesn't have the resources to put to it.

Samsagax commented 10 years ago

I looked into @liborw code and I think I can implement something for an ABB robot. Maybe we should add a standard configuration file to map I/O units and addresses to human readable form. Or perhaps we can add identifiers instead of I/O addresses, but that would depend greatly on each manufacturer's controller capabilities.

shaun-edwards commented 10 years ago

@Samsagax, The difficulty in this issue is standardizing IO addressing across robot platforms. @gavanderhoorn is currently putting together a plan for this. While we could implement specific solutions for different robots, it makes sense to take a generic approach so we can standardize at a driver level. This will allow for code portability across vendor platforms.

Samsagax commented 10 years ago

@gavanderhoorn is currently putting together a plan for this.

@gavanderhoorn, are you open for help?

shaun-edwards commented 10 years ago

@gavanderhoorn, ping...it looks like @Samsagax is willing to help out.

gavanderhoorn commented 10 years ago

@shaun-edwards: I'd seen it, just hadn't had time to respond yet.

@Samsagax: please contact me off-list (to avoid cluttering this issue).

gavanderhoorn commented 10 years ago

See also ros-industrial/rep#7.