Robot-Agnostic Interaction Controllers Based on ROS

Abstract

In robotized industrial scenarios, the need for efficiency and flexibility is increasing, especially when tasks must be executed in dangerous environments and/or require the simultaneous manipulation of dangerous/fragile objects by multiple heterogeneous robots. However, the underlying hardware and software architecture is typically characterized by constraints imposed by the robots’ manufacturers, which complicates their integration and deployment. This work aims to demonstrate that widely used algorithms for robotics, such as interaction control, can be made independent of the hardware architecture, abstraction level, and functionality provided by the low-level proprietary controllers. As a consequence, a robot-independent control framework can be devised, which reduces the time and effort needed to configure the robotic system and adapt it to changing requirements. Robot-agnostic interaction controllers are implemented on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and made freely available to the robotic community. Experiments were performed on the Universal Robots UR10 research robot, the Comau Smart-Six industrial robot, and their digital twins, so as to demonstrate that the proposed control algorithms can be easily deployed on different hardware and simulators without reprogramming.