A Real-time Robot Control Framework Using ROS Control for 7-DoF Light-weight Robot

Abstract

Most Robot Operating System(ROS) were developed under the standard Linux kernel that can’t meet the requirements in many robot applications such as robot motion control. To overcome such issues, this paper proposes a real-time ROS control system based on Xenomai, which contains real-time nodes and non-real-time nodes that run separately on different threads. The proposed control framework supports priority-based scheduling of multitasks which is compatible with interfaces of ROS packages. The feasibility of this control framework was proven by implementation on the industrial PC. We used EtherCAT bus as communication between ROS controller and the 7-DoF light-weight robot. We conducted a variety of experiments to test its performance and applied it to a 7-DoF light-weight robot. The experiment results show that our ROS controller can efficiently control robot hardware with high real-time performance of control system.