ROS-based remote control of industrial robot joystick

Abstract

This study is interested in how to remotely control the industrial robot with a joystick. Thus, a robotic remote control system was designed. The developed system solved two key problems. One is to realize the information exchange between robot operating system (ROS) and control cabinet. A new application program interface (API) was developed to carry out the secondary development of industrial robots. Ethernet connection was used to exchange system data and the communication delay is less than 10 ms. The other is to improve the robot operation efficiency. Because of the joystick’s unique operation mode, the robot motion operation can be realized efficiently and reliably through a joystick as an external input device of ROS. Finally, the validating experiments were carried out to compare the work efficiency of robot manipulation using joystick, jogging keys and 6D Mouse. The comparison results demonstrates that the operation efficiency using joystick can be increased by at least 20% compared to using jogging keys and 6D Mouse.