Since announcing this ROS driver hardware database in January, we’ve gotten a lot of submissions from folks of additional robot hardware that are using ROS. We have also added more robot arms that do not yet support ROS 2. In total we are now tracking 34 robot arm brands, and we are excited to share to the ROS community that about 85% of them have ROS 2 support.
In addition, about 76% of those drivers are supported by the arm vendor! Caveat: these statistics do not reflect driver quality - some implementations are not as good as others.
We will continue to expand our database of ROS 2 real-time drivers and encourage you to submit hardware that is missing. Not only are we tracking robot arms - it also includes AMRs, cameras, end effectors, and much more.
We also encourage you to reach out to vendors directly if there are missing or sub-par drivers - they are very responsive to customer demand. Especially from larger companies.
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How are we counting robotic arms here? For example, KUKA sells over 130 different arm models, but you only have their cobots (iiwa and iisy models) listed here. Another example is that Kinova has ROS 2 drivers for their Gen3 arm but not their Link6 arm.
Based on the chart, would a more accurate statement be that “82% of arm manufactures tracked have ROS 2 for some of their arms”?
In many cases it’s not about manipulators specifically. Most drivers for industrial robots are manipulator agnostic, and only require certain controller series and/or software options to be present.
I’m also not sure where the 85% comes from: is this tracking whether support packages / URDFs are available? What are “all robotic arms”?
A few answers:
How are we counting robotic arms here?
There would be thousands of robots to track if we listed the exact model, feature code, etc for every brand of robot out there. That would be a tremendous effort and it would continuously get out of date. We are only listing each brand once, though we did make a special exception for KUKA because @mhubii convinced us his community driver was better in a number of ways over the official vendor supported driver.
have ROS 2 for some of their arms
Yes, its very common that a company does not support ROS 2 for every robot they offer. Our goal however it to emphasize that a huge number of companies do support ROS 2 now, and should continue doing so!
What are “all robotic arms ”?
Keyword “About” in the title - its from a pretty big search of the internet for various brands of robot arms. We think we have all the major ones, though there perhaps smaller brands most of us have never heard of that we might be missing. Part of this post is to encourage folks to help us better document any missing arms or drivers.
We also encourage you to reach out to vendors directly if there are missing or sub-par drivers - they are very responsive to customer demand. Especially from larger companies.
I want to co-sign this.
We have a persistent and pernicious problem where people prefer to suffer in silence instead of contacting robot component OEMs or file an issue. If you are having problems with a missing or substandard ROS driver get noisy! File a ticket. Talk to your sales rep. Complain on the internet!
The squeaky wheel gets the grease and we need ROS users to squeak more. 
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