How to communicate with Hand-E / UR3e using ROS

Lukas97

Greetings,

I want to control the Hand-E as well as the UR3e via ROS and unfortunately I don't have that much experience yet.

To control the UR3e I downloaded the Universal_Robot_ROS_Driver and activated the headless_mode. So I can control the arm. However, I have problems with the simultaneous control of the Gripper. I tried to send the Gripper.script for the gripper to the robot with following python script:

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

s.connect((self.host, self.port_gripper))

f = open (self.target, "rb")

l = f.read(1024)

while (l):

   s.send(l)

   l = f.read(1024)

But since the ur_robot_driver is currently running, the ur_robot_driver loses connection when sending the file to control the gripper and I can not control the arm anymore without restarting the ur_robot_driver. So how can I control the Hand-E?

Is there any way, that it could work this way, or do I need to get a long cable from my computer to the Hand-E? Or can I somehow do the Gripper controlling with the Universal_Robot_ROS_Driver?

Thanks!

bcastets

I don t have the answer to your question but I would recommend to check this post:
https://dof.robotiq.com/discussion/1962/programming-options-ur16e-2f-85#latest

There are several way to communicate with a gripper connected to a UR robot. You go through client interface but some people go through UR RS485 URCAP or communicate directly with the robotiq gripper URCAP server.

Communicating directly with URCAP server looks interesting. I never tried it but it is probably the best.

The easiest solution is to connect the gripper directly to your PC.