Installation of the ur_robot_driver

You can either install this driver from binary packages as shown above or build it from source. We recommend a binary package installation unless you want to join development and submit changes.

Note

Controlling the robot using ROS raises the requirement for strict cycle times. To achieve this, we strongly recommend to use a lowlatency or even PREEMPT_RT-patched kernel. See real time setup for details on setting this up.

For the same reason we encourage users to use a direct network connection between the ROS pc and the robot controller without a switch.

Install from binary packages

1. Install ROS2. This branch supports only ROS2 Rolling. For other ROS2 versions, please see the respective branches.

2. Install the driver using

   sudo apt-get install ros-${ROS_DISTRO}-ur
   

Build from source

Before building from source please make sure that you actually need to do that. Building from source might require some special treatment, especially when it comes to dependency management. Dependencies might change from time to time. Upstream packages (such as the library) might change their features / API which require changes in this repo. Therefore, this repo’s source builds might require upstream repositories to be present in a certain version as otherwise builds might fail. Starting from scratch following exactly the steps below should always work, but simply pulling and building might fail occasionally.

1. Install ROS2. This branch supports only ROS2 Rolling. For other ROS2 versions, please see the respective branches.

   Once installed, please make sure to actually source ROS2 before proceeding.

3. Make sure that colcon, its extensions and vcs are installed:

   sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions python3-vcstool
   

4. Create a new ROS2 workspace:

   export COLCON_WS=~/workspace/ros_ur_driver
   mkdir -p $COLCON_WS/src
   

5. Clone relevant packages (replace <branch> with humble, iron or main for rolling), install dependencies, compile, and source the workspace by using:

   cd $COLCON_WS
   git clone -b <branch> https://github.com/UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver.git src/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver
   vcs import src --skip-existing --input src/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver-not-released.${ROS_DISTRO}.repos
   rosdep update
   rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths src -y
   colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
   source install/setup.bash
   

6. When consecutive pulls lead to build errors it is possible that you’ll have to build an upstream package from source, as well. See the [detailed build status](ci_status.md). When the binary builds are red, but the semi-binary builds are green, you need to build the upstream dependencies from source. The easiest way to achieve this, is using the repos file:

   cd $COLCON_WS
   vcs import src --skip-existing --input src/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver/Universal_Robots_ROS2_Driver.${ROS_DISTRO}.repos
   rosdep update
   rosdep install --ignore-src --from-paths src -y