PathPilot robot

Alpiniste wrote: Tormach is unveiling a new robot arm based on ROS+Machinekit:


I would love to have pre-made package for robot retrofitting. Is it true that Tormach pushes everything back to open source?

The look ahead trajectory planner was pushed back to linuxcnc.
fanuc subroutines are probably from Tormach.

We surely haven't incorporated everything they offer - there is no official process.
And the longer we are forked the harder it is to incorporate code.

If they are using Machinekit then that pretty much ends what we can use (IMHO)

i had voiced the opinion that we should have considered using their HAL code, but that was not popular among the few developers we have.


Linuxcnc can run robots directly but not in anyway you would usually run them for industry and it's not a focus of any real development.
Interfacing to ROS was a smart solution.
I would bet that someone could write code to connect our HAL to ROS.
But i still think it would be smarter to get out motion controller use their HAL code.

I think running real robots (indirectly) with linuxcnc is an exciting development - congrats to Machinekit and Tormach!

Side info:
Having worked with industrial Kuka robots, the amount of parameters and settings and constraints and interlocks implemented is astonishing.
So being able to control such machine with LinuxCNC with a week or two of effort is also astonishing, and is a testament to the flexibility of LinuxCNC.
Of course it does not have everything the industrial ones have, but industrial ones do not have everything sorted out either, check "singularity" as it is still an issue with them.

cmorley wrote: I would bet that someone could write code to connect our HAL to ROS.

I think someone already has, github.com/tomlarkworthy/linuxCNC_ROS