A ROS2 Interface for Universal Robots Collaborative Manipulators Based on ur_rtde

The Universal Robots RTDE communication interface is well-known in literature and it was used in several works. In [5] and [6] RTDE was adopted to control UR cobots. In [7], [8], and [9], the RTDE interface was used only for data acquisition. To facilitate the development of external applications for UR cobots, various higher-level software interfaces and drivers have been proposed based on RTDE. In addition to the official software interface by Universal Robots (ur_client_li-brary), a few alternatives have been developed by third-parties. One of these software interfaces is ur_rtde [4] by SDU Robotics, which was used in this work. Another similar interface is python-urx [10], which is a Python interface for tasks that do not require high control frequency.