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Optimax Methods is America’s largest optics prototype producer within the medical, protection, and house industries. Optimax optics are aboard Mars rovers, Pluto New Horizons, Tess, ROMAN, Mercury messenger, the ISS, and extra – if it has a lens and goes to house, Optimax most likely manufactured it. After all, Optimax additionally provides customized lenses right here on Earth for analysis and protection.

Optimax’s R&D workforce approached PickNik for assist in bettering the smoothness of their robots utilizing the open-source Robotic Working System (ROS) platform of their freeform optics manufacturing course of. A freeform optic is an optic that’s not rotationally symmetric. The manufacturing course of of those optics begins with milling the tough form, then sprucing with an ABB industrial arm and freeform metrology instruments. Remaining smoothing is then carried out on a Common Robotic or an ABB robotic arm to cut back any errors from earlier steps.

Optimax had points with jerky motions and latency with the ROS 1 ABB arm setup, which had been the first motivators to make use of a new ROS 2 driver. Additionally they had a need to maneuver to ROS 2 for higher long-term help, in addition to for the power to make use of the ROS 2 Management library, a standard low-level controller interface. A driver based mostly on ROS 2 Management additionally permits to be used of PickNik’s admittance controller to keep up fixed power throughout sprucing. Nevertheless, no ROS 2 driver for ABB manipulators existed on the time, necessitating the event and launch of abb_ros2, a ROS 2 driver for ABB robotic arms.

Resolution

To transition the prevailing ROS 1 structure to ROS 2, PickNik and Optimax collaborated to develop abb_ros2, an open-source driver for ABB arms that makes use of ROS 2 Management. ABB supported this effort by offering entry to their proprietary robotic simulation software program, RobotStudio, which was used to check driver performance throughout improvement with no need {hardware}.

Two PickNik engineers labored with Optimax R&D engineers to investigate Optimax’s information from a ROS 1 prototype. PickNik analyzed the ache factors from the ROS 1 implementation, which centered on latency and jerky movement. Then we developed a plan to handle each of those ache factors, in tandem with the event of a ROS 2 ABB driver.

The motive force communicates immediately with an ABB robotic or simulation, or it will probably spoof ROS 2 Management drivers for testing with no robotic or proprietary simulation software program. This enables for fast iteration on planning with out the necessity for customized tooling. The motive force additionally helps coordinating motions with further joints connected to the robotic (exterior axes), such because the bottom-mounted gantry Optimax makes use of to extend their workspace. Lastly, the motive force additionally integrates with the ABB StateMachine add-in], which can be utilized to manage the robotic by way of a state machine and IO manipulation.

With the newly-developed ROS 2 Management driver, Optimax had entry to new instruments to unravel their issues. First, enter toolpaths had sharp corners that exceeded the jerk limits of the robotic joints. This may trigger {hardware} points corresponding to faults or long-term harm. Second, the toolpaths Optimax makes use of might have as much as 500,000 waypoints, which triggered extreme latency when despatched to the robotic. PickNik’s personal MoveIt Ruckig trajectory processing plugin was in a position to clean the waypoints such that the ultimate processed trajectory would obey jerk limits, and ship waypoints separately to keep away from reminiscence and latency limitations attributable to one big trajectory.

Final result

This collaboration between PickNik and Optimax resulted within the launch of an open-source ROS 2 driver for ABB robots, which the ROS 2 neighborhood has extensively used. The motive force was delivered forward of schedule and under funds, permitting for improvement of further options past the preliminary scope with assist from the open-source neighborhood. PickNik’s help has helped Optimax combine ROS 2 into their manufacturing processes and to leverage the newest trajectory processing options supplied by MoveIt and Ruckig.

This has considerably elevated the general stability of Optimax’s robotic sprucing platform and when it comes to functionality, has allowed Optimax to extend the scale of components that they’ll polish. As well as, PickNik’s collaboration improved Optimax’s information assortment and boosted the gross sales of their power controller product.