Setting up a Universal Robot in gazebo

and executing trajectories with moveit

This article assumes you are comfortable with the bash terminal, git and ROS1(Robot Operating System).

The first thing you will need is ROS1.
We will definitely tackle ROS2+moveit in a future article.
If you do not have ROS1 yet, have a look at my other post where I have setup a simple bash script that will install ROS for you with a single command.

After making sure ROS works, follow the steps below

Setting things up

1. First create and initialize a catkin workspace with the following command. We will call ours moveit_ws

   mkdir -p /the/full/path/moveit_ws/src && cd /the/full/path/moveit_ws
   

   catkin_make
   

2. Clone the universal robot description and moveit setup from fmauch’s repository into src of your workspace

   git clone -b calibration_devel git@github.com:fmauch/universal_robot.git src/universal_robot
   

3. If you are planning to control the real robot/ur-sim (we will do that in the next article), then you will also need the following repository

   git clone https://github.com/UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver.git src/Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver
   

4. We have to install dependencies before we can make the packages. Thanks to rosdep that is simple

   rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
   

5. We are only one step away from actually running the robot at this stage, make your packages with the following command and remember to source your workspace before going to the next section

   catkin_make
   

Getting the robot to move

1. First we need to launch the robot simulation. This is our robot in the virtual world

   roslaunch ur_gazebo ur10e_bringup.launch
   

2. Now we launch the entire moveit pipeline

   roslaunch ur10e_moveit_config ur10e_moveit_planning_execution.launch sim:=true
   

3. The most straightforward way to plan and execute robot motion is to do it via rviz. Let us bring that up now.

   roslaunch ur10e_moveit_config moveit_rviz.launch rviz_config:=$(rospack find ur10e_moveit_config)/launch/moveit.rviz
   

You should now be able to simply click and drag the big green blob (or the arrows around it) to set your desired pose and click on the button Plan and Execute. Remember to set the planning group to manipulator.

Now that we have control over the robot, we can use this workspace to build more complex and super interesting packages on top of it. We will also have a look at the python interface to moveit call the moveit_commander.

Ideas? comments? suggestions for improvement?
Feel free to reach me on my E-mail