Optimizing the Universal Robots ROS driver

In this report I will examine both the current and the possible performance of one of the most popular robotics platforms in research, the Universal Robot manipulator. I will solely focus on the ROS based approaches and show how the current driver can be improved. I will look at performance improvement both in terms of faster reaction as well as making it possible to control the robot using either ros_control or ordinary joint speed commands, which is required for many types of sensory based control like visual servoing.

The developed driver is compared to the drivers already existing in the ROS framework to prove the improved performance.