robohouse-delft / abbegm-rs

externally guided motion for ABB industrial robots

abbegm

This library implements the communication layer of ABB externally-guided motion.

Externally-guided motion (or EGM) is an interface for ABB robots to allow smooth control of a robotic arm from an external PC. In order to use it, the Externally Guided Motion option (689-1) must be installed on the robot controller.

EGM can be used to stream positions to a robot controller in either joint space or cartesian space. It can also be used to apply corrections to a pre-programmed trajectory.

To communicate with a robot controller in blocking mode, use sync_peer::EgmPeer. Use tokio_peer::EgmPeer if you want to communicate with a robot controller asynchronously.

Warning

Industrial robots are dangerous machines. Sending poses to the robot using EGM may cause it to perform dangerous motions that could lead to damage, injuries or even death.

Always take appropriate precautions. Make sure there are no persons or animals in reach of the robot when it is operational and always keep an emergency stop at hand when testing.

Units and rotation conventions

Unless specified differently, all distances and positions are in millimeters and all angles are in degrees. This may be somewhat odd, but it is what the robot controller expects.

You should use unit quaternions to represent 3D orientations, not Euler angles or roll-pitch-yaw. Using unit quaternions avoids the need to specify which Euler angles or roll-pitch-yaw representation is used. Quaternions come with the added advantage that you do not have to use degrees.

Features

Some optional features are available. Note that all features are enabled by default. To avoid unnecessary dependencies you can disable the default features and select only the ones you need:

[dependencies]
abbegm = { version = "...", default-features = false, features = ["nalgebra"] }

The available features are:

• tokio: enable the asynchronous peer.
• nalgebra: implement conversions between nalgebra types and EGM messages.

Re-generating protobuf messages.

The Rust code for the protobuf messages are generated using prost. Normal users do not need to worry about this, but during development it may be necessary to re-generate the messages. To do so, go into the generate folder and run the program:

cd "generate"
cargo run