Setting up a UR robot for ur_robot_driver

Prepare robot and network connection

Before you can use the ur_robot_driver you need to prepare the robot and the network connection as described in the robot_setup and network_setup section of the UR Client Library documentation.

Prepare the ROS PC

For using the driver make sure it is installed (either by the debian package or built from source inside a colcon workspace).

Extract calibration information

Each UR robot is calibrated inside the factory giving exact forward and inverse kinematics. To also make use of this in ROS, you first have to extract the calibration information from the robot.

Though this step is not necessary to control the robot using this driver, it is highly recommended to do so, as otherwise endeffector positions might be off in the magnitude of centimeters.

For this, there exists a helper script:

$ ros2 launch ur_calibration calibration_correction.launch.py \
robot_ip:=<robot_ip> target_filename:="${HOME}/my_robot_calibration.yaml"

Note

The robot must be powered on (can be idle) before executing this script.

For the parameter robot_ip insert the IP address on which the ROS pc can reach the robot. As target_filename provide an absolute path where the result will be saved to.

See Startup the driver for instructions on using the extracted calibration information.