Official ROS2 Driver Release for Mitsubishi Electric Industrial Robot MELFA: MELFA ROS2 Driver

Mitsubishi Electric aims to integrate their MELFA robots into the ROS2 ecosystem, allowing robotics developers and integrators to utilize their industry proven platform seamlessly in ROS-based applications.

By developing MELFA ROS2 packages, Mitsubishi Electric seeks to enable developers to leverage on the flexibility, modularity, and extensive support of ROS2 community coupled with proven global hardware support.

MELFA ROS2 Driver is a collaborative effort between ROS-I Consortium Asia Pacific and Mitsubishi Electric Asia. MELFA ROS2 Driver consists of modular components that allow users to interface with the robot’s motion control, state monitoring, and digital/analog I/O operations in ROS2 control framework. This development bridges the gap between Mitsubishi Electric automation hardware and ROS2, providing developers with the tools needed to build, deploy, and manage robotic applications on an industrial platform effectively.

MELFA ROS2 Driver I/O controllers enable cyclic communication between ROS2 and MELFA. Developers can leverage on the IQ platform through MELFA ROS2 Driver to access other Mitsubishi Electric automation products (such as PLC, HMI, motor drives, NC machines), utilize industrial networks (such as CC-Link, PROFINET, EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, DeviceNet, etc) and explore time sensitive networks (such as CC-Link IE TSN).

MELFA ROS2 Driver is designed for flexibility, supporting various ROS2 packages such as MoveIt2 for motion planning and custom nodes for specialized tasks.

MELFA ROS2 driver will officially support 9 models in the first batch and will aim to support more than 20 models in the near future

• Vertical Robots

  RV-2FR

  RV-4FR

  RV-4FRL

  RV-7RL

  RV-13FRL

  RV-8CRL

• COBOT

  RV-5AS

• Horizontal Robots

  RH-6FRH5520

  RH-6CRH6020

Users can access detailed documentation and installation instructions from the official repository [https://github.com/Mitsubishi-Electric-Asia/melfa_ros2_driver] to get started or talk to the developers from Mitsubishi Electric on [https://github.com/orgs/Mitsubishi-Electric-Asia/discussions/1]