This is a meta-package containing everything to run an ABB robot or simulation with ROS 2.

• abb_bringup: Launch files and ros2_control config files that are generic to many types of ABB robots.
• abb_hardware_interface: A ros2_control hardware interface using abb_libegm.
• abb_rws_client: A package containg nodes for RWS only communication.
• robot_specific_config: Packages containing robot description and config files that are unique to each type of ABB robot.
• abb_resources: A small package containing ABB-related xacro resources.
• docs: More detailed documentation.
• robot_studio_resources: Code and a pack-and-go solution to begin using RobotStudio easily.
• abb_ros2: A meta-package that exists to reserve the repo name in rosdistro

There are three ways to use this package:

• With an actual, physical ABB robot

• With ROS 2 simulating the robot controllers

• With an ABB RobotStudio simulation. Requires 2 PC's (one Windows, one Linux)

Detailed setup instructions can be found here.

The IRB1200-5-0.9 is the only robot that has robot description and config files as of March 2022. Pull requests to add additional robot types are welcome.

This package has a pre-commit check that runs in CI. You can use this locally and set it up to run automatically before you commit something. To install, use pip:

pip3 install pre-commit

To run over all the files in the repo manually:

pre-commit run -a

To run pre-commit automatically before committing in a local repo, install git hooks:

pre-commit install

If you're wondering what tracing is and how to use this information, you most probably don't need tracing at this point. Despite this passive agressive tone (which is introduced to add a little bit of humor), we provide some information to get you started with tracing.

Sunrise added the tracepoints within the read and write functions of the hardware interface. You can see this by inspecting the read and write functions of the abb_hardware_interface.cpp file.

Additionally, we added the source and header files for these tracepoints in the src and include directories, respectively. These files were generated with the lttng-gen-tp tool using the definition in hardware_interface.tp. After creation, they were slightly modified to adjust the paths of the include.

Tracing is turned off by default. To turn it on, define the ENABLE_TRACING variable at build time with --cmake-args -DENABLE_TRACING=OFF. Example with colcon:

$ colcon build --packages-select abb_hardware_interface --cmake-args -DENABLE_TRACING=OFF

Once built, you should start a tracing session with ros2_tracing:

ros2 trace --session-name abb-hardware-interface -u hardware_interface:* --list

The arguments are as follows:

• --session-name is the name of the session. This is then reflected in the directory where the trace data is stored (e.g. ~/.ros/tracing/abb-hardware-interface).
• -u hardware_interface:* will trace all events from the hardware_interface namespace.
• --list will list all the events that can be traced.

After that, run the ROS 2 control nodes as usual.

To inspect the data of the tracing session, we recommend using babeltrace2. If created the trace data according to the example above, you can inspect it with:

babeltrace2 ~/.ros/tracing/abb-hardware-interface | less

This will open a pager with the trace data. It will look something like this:

[14:51:33.967204443] (+0.000080284) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:write_start: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareSmall" }
[14:51:33.967218440] (+0.000013997) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:write_end: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareSmall" }
[14:51:33.967219471] (+0.000001031) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:write_start: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareBig" }
[14:51:33.967221196] (+0.000001725) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:write_end: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareBig" }
[14:51:33.971103015] (+0.003881819) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:read_start: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareSmall" }
[14:51:33.971147404] (+0.000044389) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:read_end: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareSmall" }
[14:51:33.971148861] (+0.000001457) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:read_start: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareBig" }
[14:51:33.971154327] (+0.000005466) sunrise-rtc hardware_interface:read_end: { cpu_id = 0 }, { vpid = 1519705, procname = "ros2_control_no", vtid = 1519779 }, { if_name = "ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareBig" }

In this example we have two controllers; ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareSmall and ABBMultiInterfaceHardwareBig. The events write_start, write_end, read_start, and read_end events are logged for both controllers.

First and foremost, I hope you will not need to do this.

The How to use ros2_tracing to trace and analyze an application guide is a good starting point to get tracing going. We are using Humble, which means you will need to build ROS 2 from source. This has also some other implications. For example ...

The FastDDS package that is available on upstream is not up to date with the version that allows you to use tracing. It boils down to some development libraries that are needed for LTTng. Please follow the instructions in the FastDDS documentation.

This part is required only if you are on a real-time computer. That is, a Linux with the PREEMPT_RT patch applied to the kernel. Follow the instructions available in the repo.