Setup UR5 With MoveIt

This section contains the instructions to install the dependencies that are required to make UR5 robot run in simulation and real execution with MoveIt.

System Requirement

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 on 64-bit

Dependencies

Install ROS Melodic.

Install MoveIt.

Install ros_control:

sudo apt install ros-melodic-ros-control ros-melodic-ros-controllers

Download and install ROS-Industrial, universal_robot and ur_modern_driver. universal_robot contains the urdf files, communication message format and kinematics plugins of UR robots. ur_modern_driver is the UR robot ROS driver, which is in charge of publishing robot state, sending the MoveIt generated joint trajectory message to the robot factory controller.

cd <catkin_workspace>/src

# ROS-Industrial
git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/industrial_core.git

# universal_robot
git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot.git

# ur_modern_driver
git clone -b kinetic-devel https://github.com/ros-industrial/ur_modern_driver.git

cd .. && catkin build

Verify Setup

You can verify the UR5 setup by running:

# terminal 1
roslaunch ur_description ur5_upload.launch

# terminal 2
roslaunch ur_description test.launch

at the left Displays panel of Rviz, change the fixed frame to “base_link”, and add RobotModel and TF, then you can see UR5 brought up in Rviz.

If you would like to see UR5 brought up in Gazebo, run:

roslaunch ur_gazebo ur5.launch