Development of a ROS 2 Hardware Interface for Comau manipulators.

The Robotic Operating System (ROS) is an open-source set of software frameworks, providing a plethora of services used to develop the software that runs on robots. ROS2 is an API overhaul for ROS, intended to open up the framework to the option of working in real time, as well as running on a wider range of machines. The objective of this thesis is to write an Hardware Interface capable of working with the COMAU family of robots within the ROS 2 framework. To do this the starting point was the Comau hardware interface which had already been developed for the ROS 1 framework, which was analyzed to see which parts could be ported over to the new one, then the examination moved onto the ROS 2 Comau driver to determine how the new interface would interact with the rest of the package. The core of the thesis was the development of a wrapper package which allowed the user to use different planning algorithms to plan the trajectory of the robot which would be then executed by a controller, also chosen by the user. The wrapper input is the goal pose of the robot and the URDF description of its joints and links, the output is the trajectory interpolated by the chosen planner. The behaviour of the robot was then tested both on simulation/visualization software such as Rviz and the Comau Roboshop as well as real hardware on the racer-5-0.80 cobot manipulator. The results of the testing were used to optimize the wrapper for the Comau family of robots until the results were satisfactory in terms of latency of the execution and the robustness of the control. By switching the hardware interface to a ROS 2 one it was possible to achieve a lower latency than possible with ROS 1 leading to a quasi real-time behaviour of the system, as well as making the development of the application faster thanks to the tools provided by the framework.