Teaching old robots new tricks

Robots, and in particular industrial robots, are programmed to perform certain functions. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a very popular framework that facilitates the asynchronous coordination between a robot and other drives and/or devices. ROS has been a go-to means to enable the development of advanced capability across the robotics sector. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the ROS-I community often develop applications in ROS 2, the successor to ROS 1. In many cases, particularly where legacy application code is utilized bridging back to ROS 1 is still very common, and one of the challenges in supporting the adoption of ROS for industry.