[jpa]

I have a ROS friend, who tried to help a bit, but from what i understood, making a whole new set of reverse kinematics for ROS would be a fair amount of work, and i did not want to have to duplicate that work, Since i think i have those kinematics stored in the CROS.

i did manage to get a copy of Robcomm3 and CROS. BUT i can't get that to work, as there is a version mismatch between my new copy of CROS , and what CROS is already installed on my controller.

The guy that supplied the software said to never ever update my CROS on my controller. i assume that mucking about with the already installed version of CROS on my C500C could wipe out my copy of my kinematics. I am not proficient enough with computers , so this effectively scared me off from trying to re-load a new CROS copy on my C500C.

Do you have access to the CRS user guides?

ROS has quite generic kinematics generator for robot arms. I had to convert a 3D model for it and make an XML description file with the exact positions of the axes. Because CRS F3 is mechanically the same as original Kuka KR3, I found the 3D model on Kuka site. The model for ROS is available here:https://github.com/ros-industrial/kuka_e...l/pull/159

As for communication, I have now the part where robot can report its position to ROS ready:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2g7gon50NI

I still have a bit of trouble with bytes getting lost in the serial communication for some reason. After that, implementing the side for ROS to control the robot should be quite straightforward. Then I'll still need to implement something to read G-code and pass it to ROS, as it seems there isn't anything ready made for that.

Reloading the CROS does sound scary. I've taken a backup of mine using this utility:https://github.com/PetteriAimonen/crs-c5...ownload.pybut I still wouldn't attempt upgrading unless absolutely necessary.

If you have a serial terminal, you can just use that to copy RAPL-3 files to the robot, compile them with r3c there and run, no need for robcomm3. The way I've done it is to first copy uudecode.r3 utility to the built-in editor, and after that it is easier to paste other files by uuencoding them first.

It'll probably take a few months more before I'll have anything complete, but I intend to write a tutorial on this eventually. I've collected all the manuals I've found here:http://jpa.kapsi.fi/stuff/other/crs_robot/