Integration of ABB Robot Manipulators and Robot Operating System for Industrial Automation

The integration of advanced robotic technologies with modern software platforms has enabled significant advancements in industrial automation. This paper aims to introduce a novel workflow to integrate ABB industrial robot manipulators and the Robot Operating System (ROS), where communication is built through OPC Unified Architecture or a virtual controller with EGM+RWS. Moreover, we also provide a method to deploy the ROS environment using container technology in our workflow. The developed workflow was tested and evaluated in a real-world welding application, demonstrating its capability to automate the welding process of steel looped hooks for supermarket shelves with high accuracy and efficiency, in which the path planner for the robot is obtained from MoveIt by ROS. The introduced workflow can also be integrated with the MLPro framework, which enriches the workflow with machine learning-related algorithms, e.g. for path planning. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of integrating ABB industrial robot manipulators with ROS for industrial process automation and highlight the benefits of using ROS as a software platform for industrial robotics applications.