Any plan to update the fanuc ROS driver support to ROS 2 (foxy or humble)?

[hyang5]

As titled... is there any plan to update fanuc ROS drivers to support ROS 2 + MoveIt2?

[gavanderhoorn]

No, I have no immediate plans.

Main reason: this would also require packages like industrial_robot_client and simple_message to be ported, which is quite some work.

Additionally, the ROS API is so simple, and traffic so low-volume and low-rate, that the ros1_bridge (together with ros2/ros1_bridge#256) should work sufficiently well.

If this was using ros_control with some sort of high-bandwidth interface to the Fanuc controller, then yes, it would not be usable without a proper port. But that's not the case.

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Edit: see also #298 btw.

[gavanderhoorn]

@hyang5: could you perhaps describe your use-case / application? Learning about requirements helps in re-evaluating priorities.

[hyang5]

@gavanderhoorn that will be great.
We are developing a vision + motion planning solution on Intel platform. Vision solution is running on a Windows 10 based platform to localize objects at product line, output the location to guide motion planning algorithm + Fanuc robot arm. Motion planning algorithm is running on another Linux based PC, with ROS 2 Foxy + MoveIt2 motion planning (we decided to use ROS 2 Foxy for some reason). Fanuc robot arm is connected to this Linux PC and MoveIt2 will send data to robot arm for motion execution. Hence, ideally a ROS 2 based Fanuc robot arm wrapper is also expected.
Hope this would be helpful information for you to re-evaluate the priority. I can definitely also share with you more to help on your priority evaluation. Look forward to your feedback as well.

[droter]

Fanuc package works well on ROS1.

Developing on Humble but it doesn't have a ROS1 bridge. Is the idea to run something like docker-compose with main app in humble, foxy running the bridge, and noetic running the fanuc driver?

[gavanderhoorn]

@droter: yes, that should be doable.

Apart from industrial_msgs, fanuc_driver only uses standard ROS 1 interfaces which also exist in ROS 2.

industrial_core has a branch for ROS 2 with just industrial_msgs (https://github.com/ros-industrial/industrial_core/tree/ros2_msgs_only).

The bridge might not immediately pick up on it though, as it has some hard-coded expectations about names of msg/interfaces packages.

[gavanderhoorn]

It's not fanuc_driver (that will most likely never be ported to ROS 2), but for those looking for ROS 2 compatible robot support packages (ie: xacros), see gavanderhoorn/fanuc@ros2 for a WIP.