ros2 fanuc interface: Design and Evaluation of a Fanuc CRX Hardware Interface in ROS2

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a ROS2 hardware interface for Fanuc CRX robots, enabling integration with Moveit2 and demonstrating effective performance in trajectory tracking and collision avoidance despite communication delays.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ROS2 control interface for Fanuc CRX robots, including implementation details, communication protocols, and integration with Moveit2, validated through comprehensive experiments.

Findings

Robot can track paths with negligible errors under velocity limits

Collision avoidance is effective despite communication delays

Open source code is available for community use

Abstract

This paper introduces the ROS2 control and the Hardware Interface (HW) integration for the Fanuc CRX- robot family. It explains basic implementation details and communication protocols, and its integration with the Moveit2 motion planning library. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate relevant performances in the robotics field. We tested the developed ros2_fanuc_interface for four relevant robotics cases: step response, trajectory tracking, collision avoidance integrated with Moveit2, and dynamic velocity scaling, respectively. Results show that, despite a non-negligible delay between command and feedback, the robot can track the defined path with negligible errors (if it complies with joint velocity limits), ensuring collision avoidance. Full code is open source and available at https://github.com/paolofrance/ros2_fanuc_interface.