Tool Communication Interface in e-series Universal Robots

Photo by Simon Kadula on Unsplash

Universal robots are being used extensively in many domains. From packaging to surgeries, they have found their application in many places. They are also very famous and robust because of the active community they have created with their huge developer base. I believe that the universal robots forum is a place for finding answers to almost all questions one has about universal robots. I have greatly benefited from the forum, and for quite some time, I have been active in posting questions and answers in that forum. This article is an elaboration of one of my answers regarding the Tool Communication Interface for the UR Robots.

Anyone who is looking to implement a driver to send and receive control commands and data from an end-effector to an external system can benefit from this article.

1. Download the URCap file attached here:-
2. Transfer the URCaps file to the Robot controller with the help of this reference here.
3. Once the URCaps file is loaded successfully you will be able to see the output in the teach pendant saying that “RS-485 daemon runs”. Similar to the output shown below:-

The output denotes the successful working of the RS-485 daemon.

4. Once that is achieved, copy and paste the following code into your Jupyter notebook or any other Python programming interface to send and receive the data in TCI from the remote port. If you are using ROS, you can write a ROS Node on top of the given code.

References:-

1. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_networking.html 6 → helped in socket python code
   2) Socket Programming in Python — GeeksforGeeks 2 → helped in socket python code
2. GitHub — UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ToolComm_Forwarder_URCap: Utility to forward the UR Tool Communication Interface (RS-485) to a remote PC. 28 → the URCap package that we used
3. GitHub — BomMadsen/URCap-ToolCommunicationInterface: URCap sample that demonstrates assuming control and using the RS485 TCI interface on e-Series robots. 32 → gives a code-level understanding of the URCap daemon (XmlRpc, /dev/ttyTool, etc)

I hope it helps!!!

For more, you can visit my GitHub repo here at https://github.com/aswathgovind/UR_External_ToolCommunicationInterface