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I have installed Ubuntu 14.04 and installed ROS Indigo in order to run the kuka_experimental source code which can be found on Github.

I have built the catkin workspace and compiled the kuka_experimental source without errors. How do I run or launch the various KUKA robot models in RViz simulation environment? Do I ROSLaunch kuka_eki_hw_interface or kuka_rsi_hw_interface or kuka_rsi_simulator and how do I view it in RViz?

Also how to use MoveIt with this kuka_experimental package as there is no Indigo version of MoveIt and Kinetic version has compile errors and requires Ubuntu 18.04?

Greenonline
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Ezani
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2 Answers2

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I'd recommend installing a more recent version of Ubuntu (20.04 at best) and then following the ros industrial tutorials http://wiki.ros.org/Industrial/Tutorials or https://industrial-training-master.readthedocs.io/en/melodic/index.html. You will then need to use MoveIt Setup Assistant to create a cell based on one of the support packages in the kuka_experimental repository. Ideally you also read through the MoveIt tutorials. Then you can control a "simulated" kuka model in RViz.

The eki and rsi will require the respective Addons from KUKA Gmbh (EthernetKRL oder RSI) and are only required once you actually want to run the real robot.

Simon Schmeißer
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Having looked into this for an hour or two, I thought that I'd post what little info I came up with.

You have probably already seen and read the kuka_experimental page on the ROS wiki site, seeing as you say that you have successfully compiled/installed the package, which is covered under section 3. Installation.

As stated on kuka_experimental, under 4. Tutorials

Tutorials detailing the installation and setup of the packages will be made available at a later date.

For the generic ROS-Industrial tutorials, please see the ROS-Industrial training exercises

and no update has been made since 2018-03-04. Clearly, the training exercises page does not offer help for the experimental release.

That said, if you look at the Issues page of the Github repo, in particular the open issues related to "experimental and the closed issues related to "experimental", then a few issues pop up that might be useful, such as:

So this shows that you could, at least, use either kuka_eki_hw_interface or kuka_rsi_hw_interface.

Beyond that, I didn't find much more information, so maybe request that the documentation is expanded by raising a Github issue for more documentation or see https://github.com/ros-industrial/kuka_experimental/discussions for more specific questions.

However, at a guess, seeing as the code is experimental, this release is probably only intended for those who really know the intricacies of ROS, and who would be able to get the code up and running, unaided.

Greenonline
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    Please don't contact (or recommend contacting) maintainers directly. Instead use the respective support channels like this page here for general questions, answers.ros.org for past general questions or https://github.com/ros-industrial/kuka_experimental/discussions for more specific questions. For actual actionable issues use https://github.com/ros-industrial/kuka_experimental/issues – Simon Schmeißer Jul 02 '23 at 15:00
  • @SimonSchmeißer - I have updated my answer. Please feel free to further edit my answer to remove any bad advice. – Greenonline Jul 02 '23 at 16:00