Abstract
In recent years, several robotic end-effectors have been developed and made available in the market. Nevertheless, their adoption in industrial context is still limited due to a burdensome integration, which strongly relies on customized software modules specific for each end-effector. Indeed, to enable the functionalities of these end-effectors, dedicated interfaces must be developed to consider the different end-effector characteristics, like finger kinematics, actuation systems, and communication protocols. To face the challenges described above, we present ROS End-Effector, an open-source framework capable of accommodating a wide range of robotic end-effectors of different grasping capabilities (grasping, pinching, or independent finger dexterity) and hardware characteristics. The ROS End-Effector framework, rather than controlling each end-effector in a different and customized way, allows to mask the physical hardware differences and permits to control the end-effector using a set of high-level grasping primitives automatically extracted. By leveraging on hardware agnostic software modules including hardware abstraction layer (HAL), application programming interfaces (APIs), simulation tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs), ROS End-Effector effectively facilitates the integration of diverse end-effector devices. The proposed framework capabilities in supporting different robotics end-effectors are demonstrated in both simulated and real hardware experiments using a variety of end-effectors with diverse characteristics, ranging from under-actuated grippers to anthropomorphic robotic hands. Finally, from the user perspective, the manuscript provides a set of examples about the use of the framework showing its flexibility in integrating a new end-effector module.
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Availability of data and materials
The ROS End-Effector package is available in the official ROS/ROS2 repositories with the name ros−ROS_DISTRO−end−effector. A video presenting the features of ROS End-Effector and showing the experiments carried out is attached with this article, and it is also available at the following link: https://youtu.be/X0qpSsFQg1M.
Code Availability
The C\(++\) code of ROS End-Effector is available open-source with the Apache\(-2.0\) license at https://github.com/ADVRHumanoids/ROSEndEffector.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant numbers 732287 (ROS-Industrial)).The authors want to thanks Diego Vedelago and Stefano Carrozzo for the support with the experiments on the HERI II hand and Arturo Laurenzi for the guidance and the support in the implementation of the GUI.
Funding
Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Genova within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant numbers 732287 (ROS-Industrial)).
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Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal Analysis, and Investigation: Davide Torielli, Liana Bertoni, Nikos Tsagarakis, Luca Muratore; Software: Davide Torielli, Liana Bertoni, Fabio Fusaro, Luca Muratore; Writing - original draft preparation: Davide Torielli; Writing - review and editing: Davide Torielli, Nikos Tsagarakis, Luca Muratore; Validation: Davide Torielli, Fabio Fusaro, Luca Muratore; Visualization: Davide Torielli; Supervision and Funding acquisition: Nikos Tsagarakis, Luca Muratore.
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Torielli, D., Bertoni, L., Fusaro, F. et al. ROS End-Effector: A Hardware-Agnostic Software and Control Framework for Robotic End-Effectors. J Intell Robot Syst 108, 70 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-023-01911-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-023-01911-5