Robot Operating System Gets A New Interface

ST Robotics has built an interface between its RoboForth natural language system and Robot Operating System (ROS), adding more flexibility to its industrial robots. Reportedly, making the ST Robots compatible with ROS has resulted in a very fast interface with the ST robot responding faster than any other robot that is currently compatible with ROS.  A user at Waterloo University in Canada writes: "RoboForth is so lean and the performance on Linux is insanely good.  There aren't any other industrial grade robots that have this kind of performance."

 

Collaborating with Cambridge University on the ROS integration, ST has been modeling the ST R12 robot to create data files called URDF (Universal Robotic Description Format) files.  Motion is then programmed using MoveIt!, a part of the ROS module that enables the user to send joint angles to any robot in the system, and the motion can be graphically viewed with rviz (ROS visualization). The code for the ROS/RoboForth interface is available for free on the development platform GitHub. 

 

For more details, visit ST Robotics, email [email protected], and/or call 609-584 7522.