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

Logo Yaskawa Motoman.jpg

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:

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.

ROS IN DER INDUSTRIELLEN ANWENDUNG

Fraunhofer IPA to host ROS-I Seminar in Germany

The open-source “Robot Operating System” (ROS) offers highly-developed robotics software components, which can be used in flexible industrial applications. In this praxis-oriented seminar you will get in touch with the basic functionalities of the ROS framework and the ROS-Industrial initiative. Participants will get an impression about the power of the system and learn how to use it in their own application.

Dynamic environments with a variety of different work pieces create a demand for highly flexible automation solutions supported by sensors and intelligent software components. A cost efficient, reusable and powerful solution is the open-source framework ROS. It offers a huge amount of intelligent algorithms, methods and integrated libraries. An advantage is that software as well as hardware components can easily be exchanged due to a network based communication layer and standardized interfaces. One example for standardization is the simple message protocol which interfaces multiple industrial robot controllers and offers a common interface on the ROS level. Another focus of ROS-Industrial is to enhance software quality through a model-driven-engineering approach and automated testing. This allows for time efficient and cost effective software development and lowers the overall development costs.

In robotics research, ROS is already a well-established standard. The next step is to bring this power to industrial applications. For this purpose, the ROS-Industrial initiative was founded. This seminar will get participants in touch with the theoretical basics of ROS and teach how to practically use it for their own industrial application.

Ros in der Industriellen Anwendung seminar will be held March 6 at Fraunhofer IPA Campus, Nobelstrasse 12, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, in parallel to the ROS-Industrial event at SwRI. International participants can register by email at anmeldung@stuttgarter-produktionsakademie.de referring to eventTS_RIT_140306".