How to control with real robot

[Cody-Vu]

Hello everyone,
I looked up into curobo but I have some questions. How does the connection to the real robot work. Lets say curobo calculates the trajectory but how it transfers to the real robot. Does it work with ROS?
Thanks in advance!

[AmirpooyaSh]

Hello @Cody-Vu,
Assuming that you know how to plan your real robot with ROS, you can use CuRobo in different ways:

1- If you're strict about developing everything within your ROS workspace, I'd recommend digging into the "isaac_ros_cumotion" GitHub repository, as they integrated CuRobo into MoveIt2 as a new path planner pipeline (I don't know how good it is cause I didn't proceed this method just because of not dealing with ROS2).

2- You can install CuRobo itself as a Python package and import its libraries directly into your ROS nodes to do path planning and publish trajectories through ROS Topics (It's doable as I already tested their package on ROS noetic to move an ABB IRB6620 arm implemented in MoveIt, but I recommend you not to get into this approach since it would be a headache if you're not that expertise with ROS).

3- Simulate your robotic arm within the Isaac Sim environment, then use Isaac Sim ROS/ROS2 Bridge to publish the CuRobo trajectories as a ROS topic. This might be hard in the beginning, but following their installation as well as new robot configuration tutorials would ease your path !! Lastly, adding ROS Bridge into Isaac Sim can be done with a couple of clicks (or lines of code if you get into Isaac Sim Python standalone).

[Cody-Vu]

Thank you very much for explaining the possible options. Currently I am using MoveIt1 with planners like OMPL and CHOMP. So I think when I want to try CuRobo out, the best option would be upgrading to MoveIt2 and use the cumotion plugin. Switching to a completely new environment wouldn't be that clever as it took some time to learn MoveIt. The only problem is that I'm using the Franka panda robot which is not officially compatible with ROS2/franka_ros2. That's why I was wondering if CuRobo could be used with ROS(1). Thanks anyways. Appreciate it!

[balakumar-s]

@Cody-Vu There are some forks for Franka Panda driver that work in ROS2, example: https://github.com/LCAS/franka_arm_ros2

I haven't tried it, but might be worth to test them out.