ROS Bridges for Common Field Busses

Hardware interfaces are particularly important for any future integration of ROS-I with production systems. During 2015, we noted four new repositories emerged that span the range of prominent industrial field busses:

• CANOPEN™: CANOPEN is a fieldbus with origins in automotive applications (CAN), but applied to automation. We are grateful for the efforts of Mathias Lüdtke and Florian Weisshardt from Fraunhofer IPA for the ros_ canopen package.
• EtherNet/IP™: EtherNet/IP is an Ethernet-based real-time communication bus standard that was created by Allen-Bradley (Rockwell Automation). Thank you ClearPath Robotics for developing and releasing a ROS driver for EtherNet/IP.
• EtherCAT™: Probably the first fieldbus supported in ROS for the PR2, EtherCAT is an Ethernet-based realtime communication bus standard that was created by Beckhoff Automation. We appreciate Intermodalics for maintaining the EtherCAT package for ROS.
• PROFINET™: PROFINET, an open automation standard and part of IEC 61158 is fully compatible with all the features of standard Ethernet, and also capable of real-time performance. We recognize the efforts of package developer Frantisek Durovsky from the Technical University of Kosice in Slovakia along with his mentor Shaun Edwards (SwRI), the financial support of Google Summer of Code program, and technical support from Siemens.