Setup and Interfacing of a KUKA Robotics Lab

Abstract

To evaluate the feasibility of controlling KUKA robots via KUKAVARPROXY, the performance of two libraries for communicating with KUKAVARPROXY is inves- tigated. It is shown that the BoostCrossCom C++ library and the jOpenShowVar Java library have comparable performance on a KUKA KRC 2. Both libraries have a mean access time of 3ms for single connections, increasing too 12ms for 5 simultaneous connections.

To interface with a gantry mounted KR 16 the existing ROS Industrial driver is expanded to control mathematically linked external axes. The raw control that RSI allows can be a safety hazard for novice users, therefore a ROS driver using BoostCrossCom is implemented.

ROS interfaces for reading data from a Schunk FTC-50-80 force-torque sensor is developed using both RSI and BoostCrossCom. In order to control a Schunk SWS-020 tool change system from ROS, a service node using BoostCrossCom is created.