Hi everyone,
A couple of us ABB robot users met during ROSCon 2024 for lunch to talk about the current state of the packages, share our experiences and see how each of us can contribute to the development. One of the things we decided to do was to open a ROS Discourse discussion, which is exactly what this post is about.
This post is intended to see how many of us are using ABB robots with ROS 2 and try to gather some brainpower and workforce to enhance the current state of the drivers and related libraries. The reason for posting here as opposed to opening issues on Github is that the code is spread out on many repositories, which makes it difficult to have a general discussion.
Some topics that we identified as needing focus are:
- Add support for ROS 2 to the package that contains the robot descriptions
- Add more documentation/guides to abb_ros2
- Work on some of the pressing issues (examples):
Another thing we talked about was a rumor that perhaps ABB could be working on a ROS 2 driver themselves. First of all, this would be just amazing. Second, does anyone have any kind of information about this? Is there some basis to this rumor?
I hope that this post reaches everyone that can contribute, is interested in the state of the driver or has any kind of knowledge to share.
Full disclosure: The company I work for is using ABB robots with ROS 2 and we want to contribute to the open source community as well.
P.S. I want to give credit to and acknowledge all the amazing work that has already been done in the past (i.e. the release of the ABB ROS driver). I also want to acknowledge the discussion of porting said driver to ROS 2.