Starting point for the summer school course

This repo is meant to be an easy way to install the UR ROS2 driver and all of its dependencies, without conflicting with anything on your personal computers. A simple script which executes a motion on a robot, while it is logging data from various topics is also available, but is only meant as a starting point or inspiration.

Official UR ROS2 Driver documentation

The official documentation for the UR ROS2 driver can be found here: Official docs

How to setup the robot: Setting up the robot

How to start the driver: Starting the driver

Read about the motion controllers used with the driver: Controllers

Once the driver is started, you can run your own scripts in a different terminal.

Details about the container

ROS2 will be sourced every time a new terminal is opened. If this creates issues, the line

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash

can be removed from the /home/robot/.bashrc file.

Starting the container

The devcontainer can be started in two ways:

Using VS Code

If using VS Code as your IDE, this devcontainer can be started by opening the folder containing this README file in VS Code, pressing F1, and pressing the option Dev Containers: Reopen in Container. The container should open, and you should be good to go.

Using the devcontainers CLI tool

Documentation for CLI tool here.

If you are using neither, I would recommend using VS Code.

Additional Notes

Use the Docker Container with GUI:

Allow local connections to your X server:

xhost +local:docker

After this you can either work with the devcontainer or start a seperate docker container:

Run the container with X11 socket and environment variable:

docker run -it \
  --env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
  --env QT_X11_NO_MITSHM=1 \
  --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
  <docker_image_name>

Inside the container, run rviz to check the GUI is working:

rviz2

Also check ompl is working:

python3 /home/ubuntu/colcon_ws/src/execute_trajectories/execute_trajectories/scripts/ompl_example.py

Run

To launch the sim do

# with default controller
ros2 launch ur_simulation_gz ur_sim_control.launch.py
# with direct joint control
ros2 launch ur_simulation_gz ur_sim_control.launch.py initial_joint_controller:="forward_position_controller"

To run it with direct joint control run

ros2 launch ur_robot_driver ur_control.launch.py ur_type:=ur5e robot_ip:=192.168.2.1 initial_joint_controller:=forward_position_controller

In another terminal do

python3 ur_trajectory_with_data_recording.py 

or for direct joint control:

python3 cubic_spline.py 

To install torch:

pip3 install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126 --break-system-packages