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Getting Started with MoveIt and UR3 on Windows

Getting Started with the MoveIt and UR3 on Windows. If you are new to MoveIt or you don't have a real robot, check out MoveIt Tutorials on Windows.

Prerequisite

  • This guide assumes you had hands-on experience on running ROSOnWindows from this document. (https://ms-iot.github.io/ROSOnWindows/GettingStarted/Setup.html)

  • This guide requires you have an Universal Robot UR3 with a software version (3.x)

MoveIt and UR3 on Windows Installation

First, you can get started by installing moveit related packages from ROSOnWindows Chocolatey server. (open a command prompt as admin) 

choco upgrade ros-melodic-desktop_full -y
choco upgrade ros-melodic-moveit -y

Then, create a workspace, checkout and build the Universal Robot Driver for UR3. (open a command prompt as admin) 

c:\opt\ros\melodic\x64\setup.bat
mkdir c:\catkin_ws\src
cd c:\catkin_ws\src
git clone https://github.com/ms-iot/universal_robot -b init_windows
git clone https://github.com/ms-iot/ur_modern_driver -b init_windows
cd c:\catkin_ws
catkin_make
c:\catkin_ws\devel\setup.bat

Now you are almost good to go to run UR3 launch files. Before proceeding, make sure your UR3 controller is on and the network is connected to your dev box.

Running UR3 Launch Files

Now let's run it! In this example, it requires three launch files to run: One is to run the UR3 driver stack for planning execution, one is to run the UR3 motion planning, and the other one is to run the visualization tool.

Let's start the UR3 driver stack: (open a command prompt as admin) 

c:\opt\ros\melodic\x64\setup.bat
c:\catkin_ws\devel\setup.bat
roslaunch ur_modern_driver ur3_bringup.launch robot_ip:=IP_OF_THE_ROBOT use_lowbandwidth_trajectory_follower:=true

Second, run the UR3 motion planning: (open a command prompt as admin) 

c:\opt\ros\melodic\x64\setup.bat
c:\catkin_ws\devel\setup.bat
roslaunch ur3_moveit_config ur3_moveit_planning_execution.launch

Finally, run the visualization tool: (open a command prompt as admin) 

c:\opt\ros\melodic\x64\setup.bat
c:\catkin_ws\devel\setup.bat
roslaunch ur3_moveit_config moveit_rviz.launch config:=true

Known Issue: When you don't see all panels displayed in RViz, try to enter full screen mode and exit (F11) to refresh the windows rendering.

Now you are ready to move the robot arm in the visualization tool and start planning and see your arm moving in action!

Troubleshoot

  1. The arm fails to move and Invalid Trajectory: start point deviates from current robot state more than ... shows in motion planning console window. It is likely the default value of allowed_start_tolerance being too small for you. Before figuring out a reasonable value, edit ur3_moveit_config/launch/move_group.launch and adding allowed_start_tolerance can help:
<node name="move_group" launch-prefix="$(arg launch_prefix)" pkg="moveit_ros_move_group"
      type="move_group" respawn="false" output="screen" args="$(arg command_args)">
  ...
  <!-- default 0.01, disable 0.0 -->
  <param name="trajectory_execution/allowed_start_tolerance" value="0.0"/>
</node>

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