Tutorial: Setting up and running the UR5 Robotic Arm

Prerequisites

This tutorials allows you to set up your environment to use the UR5 arm. It assumes that you have the following things already completed:

• Using Ubuntu 16.04
• ROS kinetic installed, catkin_ws set up and in use

Assuming you have the above ready to go, follow these steps:

Permissions

Step 0 Before anything else, if this is your time doing this, or if your computer has a new paritition of Ubuntu: Check if you're in the correct groups:
sudo usermod -a -G dialout,tty $USER

If you completed step 0, then MAKE SURE TO LOG OUT and LOG BACK IN (one time thing), then continue the below steps:

Dependencies + Build

Step 1 Install UR packages

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-universal-robot 
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ur-driver

Step 2 Install olinrobotics/ur_modern_driver and olinrobotics/universal_robot

• Clone ur_modern_driver and universal_robot into your src folder in ROS workspace
• Go back to the catkin_ws folder and catkin_make to install both packages

Connecting to the Arm

Step 3 Open reverse port 50001 for communication with robot. In a terminal:

sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 50001/tcp
sudo ufw allow 50002/tcp       # Open another port 50002 if you want to control two robot arms

Step 4 Setup a custom wired network for the UR5 robot communication. This is located in the Wifi menu, go to Edit Connections, add the below information under IPv4 Settings

• Edit Connections
• Add
• Ethernet
• Name the connection something you'll remember
• In IPv4, select Method > Shared with other computers
• Save

Step 5 Connection to UR5 through direct ethernet connection

Running the Arm

Step 6 Launch connection

roslaunch ur_bringup ur5_bringup.launch robot_ip:=IP_OF_THE_ROBOT [reverse_port:=REVERSE_PORT]

IP_OF_THE_ROBOT Check the arm's control panel to verify the robot IP.

REVERSE_PORT reverse port is the port you open in Step 3: either 50001 or 50002

Currently, the IPs are: 10.42.1.175 and 10.42.0.54

Step 7 Test command

PLEASE STOP! There is no test command. You should not run any random python script to move a UR5 arm without using the MoveIt! interface. It's extremely dangerous to run a script without knowing what the arm would do. Please refer to MoveIt! for Xamyab to learn how to control the UR5 arm with MoveIt!, which provides us a nice planning and visualization interface in Rviz.

UR5 Firmware Update

If you need to update UR5 firmware to work with the newest ROS packages, please follow the steps below:

Step 1 To check the current firmware version of the robot, click on the About button in the home screen.

Step 2 Next, go to this website and download the newer version of the firmware: https://www.universal-robots.com/download/?option=16460#section16459

Step 3 Then, copy the downloaded file to a USB stick and insert the USB stick to the control panel. Click on Setup Robot > Update Robot and choose the file. Next, click Update and wait until it reboots.

Step 4 After the reboot, please make sure to go to the Initialization Screen and click Start to update joint firmware.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z_0hAgY948

Notes:

• Robot UR5 series: CB-Series/CB3 (Polyscope)
• Installing new hardware components may require updating of software.
• Backward compatibility is not supported.
• Software updates must be done in sequence i.e. 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.3.0, 3.3.1, etc.