[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [ROS-Industrial] Multiple robots in one controller

gavanderhoorn ros.discourse at gmail.com
Fri May 4 08:49:41 UTC 2018



[quote="gonzalocasas, post:1, topic:4694"]
One driver per robot: install the driver multiple times on the controller, changing the TCP ports or using different IP address/network cards of the robot, so that we end up with pairs of motion/status servers running per robot, and consequently, one node per robot running on ROS.
[/quote]

You don't need different IPs or NICs, different TCP ports would be enough. But yes, this is one of the approaches that is used for this sort of setup.

[quote="gonzalocasas, post:1, topic:4694"]
I dont know if that works very well that can be configured on the ros node side of things to avoid collision, but I assume is doable.
[/quote]

This setup is no different from any other multi-robot setup (ie: multiple turtlebots, or multiple static robots), so as long as `<insert planner infrastructure>` is aware of the entire scene this should just work.

[quote="gonzalocasas, post:1, topic:4694"]
Add new message types and extend existing drivers: another simple option would be to add a few additional messages that would pre-assign dispatching to a specific motion task (i.e. call set_robot(x) before sending trajectories, so that the driver knows where to dispatch this to.
[/quote]

That is also an option, but would require changes to the driver on both the robot as well as the ROS side.

Your first approach is a lot less work -- and is in fact how some early setups for YuMi worked (ie: consider each arm a separate robot). It will not allow for executing synchronous motions with all robots involved though. For that your second approach would be better suited.

[quote="gonzalocasas, post:1, topic:4694"]
Without digging into the whole multi-master or orchestration approaches
[/quote]

I don't believe this is needed, at least not for the simple setup you describe / imply in your post.





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