The Robotics System Toolbox Support Package for Manipulators enables connectivity and control of simulated cobots from Universal Robots in Gazebo and URSim using Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver and universal_robot ROS packages from Universal Robots.

If the intended end goal of your application involves only a standalone manipulation of the cobot from Universal Robots, control and connectivity workflow using the tech pendant and Polyscope software is an ideal solution. However, in majority of the robotics use-cases, the environment consists of multiple robots and sensors, and the standalone manipulation is not common. In such scenarios, ROS is widely used due to inherent advantages of hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and so on.

The support package consists of user friendly setup screens to install and configure ROS, Gazebo and URSim simulators. In addition, it also consists of universalrobot object and associated functions to read various robot states, control the robot in task or joint space, follow predefined trajectories in task or joint space and record the robot motion.

For more information on how to use the universalrobot object, refer to the Getting Started with Connecting and Controlling a Simulated UR5 Cobot from Universal Robots example. The universalrobot object has functions to control individual joint angles and cartesian pose of the robot. More advanced functions demonstrate how to use Robotics System Toolbox features to compute joint angles required to track a smooth trajectory in 3D space and command the robot to track the pre-computed trajectory.