PickNik is proud to announce the launch of the ROS 2 Hardware Drivers partners page, a new online resource showcasing robot hardware, particularly robotic arms, that are compatible with the ROS 2. This initiative is a direct result of PickNik’s long term dedication to ROS, open source, and creating open source ROS drivers for various brands of hardware. This work was undertaken by PickNik in response to needs raised at a meeting held at ROSCon 2024 by the OSRF, PickNik, ROS Industrial, and other key contributors.
The ROS 2 Hardware Drivers page is designed to serve as a useful resource for developers, integrators, and researchers, enabling them to identify compatible hardware for their ROS 2-based projects efficiently. It also acts as a barometer for the widespread adoption of ROS 2 middleware worldwide. The page lists all robots with known ROS 2 compatibility and is continually updated. If you know of ROS 2-compatible robots or components not yet featured, let us know—we’re happy to add them. PickNik also offers ROS 2 driver development services to further support the community.
Terminology
To guide users, the page incorporates a ROS 2 Driver quality score ranking methodology and introduces some terminology to better classify types of drivers:
Great: High-bandwidth streaming, typically > 500 Hz
The most complex drivers to write and the most powerful: these drivers enable visual servoing, dextrous manipulation on top of a mobile base, and sensitive force compliance (if you have a force torque sensor).
Average: Low-bandwidth trajectory, typically < 25 Hz
These allow you to avoid static obstacles you have sensed at planning time.
Poor: Low-bandwidth single-point, typically < 25 Hz
These drivers are difficult to use in advanced applications. Avoiding collisions is difficult because you cannot stream commands around the obstacles or provide a pre-planned trajectory around it.
We’re particularly excited to include details about compatibility with MoveIt Pro, our advanced solution for ML, perception, motion planning, and control. The “Compatible with MoveIt Pro” designation comes in two tiers. Gold Integration signifies hardware that PickNik has rigorously tested, complete with a working ROS 2 driver and MoveIt Pro configuration we endorse. Basic Integration indicates successful integration by a third-party company, though it has not undergone validation by PickNik.
We believe the robotics industry is so much stronger thanks to interoperability with ROS!
Great effort. Very happy to see the ternary ‘great, average, poor’ classification. You could have been political and have gone with ‘platinum, gold, silver, bronze’ and so on but that wouldn’t tell us much.
this is a cool initiative to accelerate access! If you could let users choose from multiple drivers (currently not supported) that would be great.
E.g., the LBR-Stack (GitHub - lbr-stack/lbr_fri_ros2_stack: ROS 2 integration for KUKA LBR IIWA 7/14 and Med 7/14) is a driver for the KUKA LBRs (IIWA and Med) that is designed to support any vendor SDK (freeing users of upgrading the costly SDK whilst giving them access to free top-tier ROS 2 support). This is especially valuable for researchers who may find themselves working in a small lab with little help and funding…
Apart from the overall driver quality rating, it would also be useful to know how well the hardware integrates with ros2_control, i.e. if they support ros2_control (provide an implementation of hardware_interface::SystemInterface) and which of the ros2_controllers they support.
For RGB(-D) camera sensors, ROS-Industrial has an overview here 3D Camera Survey — ROS-Industrial and there is also Sensors - ROS Wiki. If these could be integrated into the “PickNik Compatible Hardware” overview, this would be a very comprehensive hardware database as the “go to” overview for ROS users wanting to build up a new robot setup.
What would make this even better would be to put it in a central location, like docs.ros.org. Not on a company website. Make it a shared resource, easily updatable and include other hardware as well, as @christian suggested.
We would support migrating the 3D Camera Survey to docs.ros.org, if that makes sense. Frankly, as long as resources are able to be found, and there is more motivation to maintain in one location over another, i.e. it supports PickNik’s MoveIt Pro ambitions, I’m fine with a company site. For the ROS-I project, it is just the website/place we know/started, so it has been easy to add sensors that collaborators have shared experiences with, so we add them.
I think the plus point you note being at docs.ros.org is that it is maintainable by a larger community, and not a bottleneck, i.e. the website editors at companies/specific groups.
We already have a site for sharing this information in an open community focused manner. (Aka PRs to the site. We’ve already had 250 PRs from 96 contributors providing close to 200 entries.)
It has full robots of different types and components.
It has a category for mainupulators which has a lot of the same listings. And we can add additional metadata for these listings. It also has space for a richer information.
When we set it up we wanted to document the Sensors, however as we didn’t have the time to do the migration as discussed in this Issue However if there was someone who was interested in helping us migrate the content across we can recreate that category and consolidate the information. This is becoming more urgent as we are starting to think about winding down the wiki with the EOL of ROS 1.
@gavanderhoorn et al. I see your point about keeping it on ros.org, but we wanted to have a highly curated and up to date list of commercial robots that we could recommend to our customers, as they were selecting hardware.
I think think the robots.ros.org doesn’t convey the message we were trying to hit that big brands support their own ROS 2 drivers. Its too busy, out of date, and cluttered.
Our audience at ROS-I is similar to Dave’s so an easy to navigate pared list makes sense. But I see where Tully is going with migration and possibly setting up for all users, which if easily filtered, i.e. commercial/industrial/manipulators and you get basically what Dave has, then that could be a path forward. Today, yes, it is a bit cluttered and hard to navigate, but hence a chance to make it better on migration.
Also we screen content and have touched everything on 3D camera survey so we have a sense of what users can expect, which makes it a bit different.
Open to ideas. I can see a list living at PickNik, due to synergies with their MoveIt work and a broader list that maybe filtered at docs.ros.org. I think this may be up to the community to maybe voice a bit more on.
