Looking to buy UR16e, what is current (18th Dec 2019) ROS support?

Hi

My company is looking to buy a cobot with extensive ROS support. We were previously using the Sawyer and its Intera SDK, but we are now looking at alternatives.

I have not been able to find out if the UR16e has a similar level of SDK and driver support as the rethink sawyer. To take an example, if I wanted to create a simple planar movement path with the UR16e in ROS, with c++ or python, using sensors such as RGBD cameras for collision avoidance, visualizing the model and output in RVIZ, does the capability exist now to do this?

Thanks!

PS apologies to jbm who I private messaged, I could not post in the forum before but now appear to have permissions, thank you!

Hi Ross,
Where are you located? You should check out this page on our main website to find the local contact near you. https://www.universal-robots.com/distributors/

Also, we are proud to say that UR has offically released a ROS driver for UR. You can read more about it here: Universal Robots launches ROS driver

Thank you for your response! Someone has contacted me from UK distribution.

Hope you have a great christmas!

Hi

Looking at the github page, the driver only has launch files for the 3, 5 and 10, not the 16. Is it actually supported out of the box?

Thanks

This is worth opening an issue on the GitHub around this if you see something missing. I would recommend that.

We’ve waited since October for ROS support of the 16e. There is a thread here on the forum. The last response was that it wasn’t “high priority”

Please see github issues ROS support for UR16e · Issue #73 · UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver · GitHub and Add support for UR16e · Issue #460 · ros-industrial/universal_robot · GitHub. We will keep the discussion there.