ROS Configuration for the C-Gripper

Carlos 2017-02-20

Hello,

We have a problem with the communication with a robotiq gripper using ROS. I will explain the problem with more detail to check if you can help us.

We have a robot UR10 with a C-model Gripper (2 fingers). The gripper is connected to the Robot controller through one of the USB port. Then we connected the robot to the computer through Ethernet and using ROS and the modern drivers for the UR10 we can manage to control the robot using the computer. The gripper is working using the teach pendant but we want to use ROS also to control the gripper but we are not sure how to do it because we just find some tutorials of ROS using Modbus. These are the drivers that we are using:

https://github.com/ros-industrial/robotiq

And these are the tutorials that I mention:

http://wiki.ros.org/robotiq/Tutorials/Control%20of%20an%20S-Model%20Gripper%20using%20the%20Modbus%20TCP%20Protocol

So maybe you can help us with the setup to make the gripper works under ROS together with the UR10.

Regards,

Carlo

faizerd 2017-06-28

Hi,

We are doing this exact same thing and have the same issue. Did you ever find a solution to this so that the we can control the gripper attached to the UR10 through ROS?

Thanks,
Faiz Mirzs

carlosjoserg 2017-07-03

Hi @Carlos

To begin with: You can't access the gripper connected to the UR via USB using the Robotiq ROS packages directly.

However, check the answer I gave to @faizerd here if you do really want to do that, since there might be a way (that I haven't tried, but it seems feasible).

If you have problems connecting the gripper to the PC using the Robotiq ROS packages and the tutorials you mentioned, then let me know and we can sort it out (think that if you already have a PC with ROS controlling your UR, probably it'd be better to connect the gripper to the PC as well, or use EtherCAT).

Best