Tutorial: Setting up and running the UR5 Robotic Arm

Prerequisites

This tutorials allows you to set up your environment to use the UR5 arm. It assumes that you have the following things already completed:

• Using Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS kinetic installed, catkin_ws set up and in use

Assuming you have the above ready to go, follow these steps:

Permissions

0. Before anything else, if this is your time doing this, or if your computer has a new paritition of Ubuntu: Check if you're in the correct groups:
   sudo usermod -a -G dialout,tty $USER

If you completed step 0, then MAKE SURE TO LOG OUT and LOG BACK IN (one time thing), then continue the below steps:

Dependencies + Build

1. Install UR packages
   sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-universal-robot and sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ur-driver

2. Install ur_modern_driver

• Clone ur_modern_driver into your src folder in ROS workspace
• Go to the folder ur_modern_driver/include/ur_modern_driver/ur/ and find the factory.h script. In this script, around line 95 and 113, you'll see two conditionals about minor_versions. They currently say minor_version_ < 3. Change the 3's to 2's. Save the file.
• Go back to the catkin_ws folder and catkin_make to install it

Connecting to the Arm

3. Open port 50001 for communication with robot. In a terminal:

sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 50001/tcp

4. Setup a custom wired network for the UR5 robot communication. This is located in the Wifi menu, go to Edit Connections, add the below information under IPv4 Settings

• Edit Connections
• Add
• Ethernet
• Name the connection something you'll remember
• In IPv4, select Method > Shared with other computers
• Save

5. Connection to UR5 through direct ethernet connection

Running the Arm

6. Launch connection
   roslaunch ur_modern_driver ur5_bringup.launch robot_ip:=10.42.0.54
   Check the arm's control panel to verify the robot IP

7. Test command
   rosrun ur_modern_driver test_move.py
   PLEASE MAKE SURE THE ARM IS CLEAR BEFORE MOVING

8. Launch ROS topic
   rosrun hiro ur5_arm_node.py _robot_ip:=10.42.0.54
   PLEASE MAKE SURE THE ARM IS CLEAR BEFORE MOVING
   The arm can be controlled either by joint-based behavior through behaviors_cmd_%arm_name or by xyz coordinates through coordinates_cmd%arm_name For a complete example about how to control the arm, please reference this code.

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To enable debug message output to the terminal window:
http://wiki.ros.org/rosconsole#Configuration

If you need help, come find Kevin Zhang [email protected]