Yaskawa America - Motoman Robotics Division: RIC Member of the Week

What began as a collaboration between SwRI, Willow Garage, and Yaskawa America--Motoman Robotics, grew into ROS-Industrial (ROS-I). The first industrial manipulator to run an industrial robot client was a Motoman SIA 20D with DX100 controller, which would become the architecture for the driver layer in the ROS-I socket interface for manipulation. Since that first demonstration, Yaskawa has continued to support ROS-Industrial in a number of ways:

• Assisted in development of new Moto Plus modules for both the DX100 and FS100 controllers to enable both smooth and full speed manipulation via a socket interface: http://wiki.ros.org/motoman.

•  Joined the ROS-Industrial Consortium and presented “Why Industrial Robot OEMs Should Care about ROS” at our first Consortium meeting and at ROSCon 2013.

• Supported a hardware demonstration of ROS-Industrial for a deburring application at ROSCon 2013.

This early involvement and support for ROS-I has made Motoman hardware hardware easy to integrate, and has led to a number of demonstrations using their hardware:

• CloPeMa clothes folding

• Interoperability demo 

• Mobile manipulation

• Multi-scale teleoperation

• Pick and place demo

Teaser: Recently, Yaskawa has teamed with RIC EU leader Fraunhofer IPA to create a standard ROS-I interface for dual arm robots, based on guidance from a ROS-I Enhancement Proposal posted by SwRI. We will provide updates as they become available.