This repository contains ROS2 drivers for all KUKA operating systems.

Github CI	SonarCloud

The drivers require a system with ROS installed. It is recommended to use Ubuntu 22.04 with ROS humble. Iron Irwini has breaking changes in the moveit API, thus it is not yet supported. It is also recommended to use a client machine with a real-time kernel, as all three drivers require cyclic, real-time communication. Due to the real-time requirement, Windows systems are not recommended and covered in the documentation.

The driver is not available as a binary package, building from source is necessary.

Create ROS2 workspace (if not already created).

mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src

Clone KUKA ROS2 repositories.

cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/kroshu/kuka_drivers.git
vcs import < kuka_drivers/upstream.repos

Install and initialize rosdep (if not already done)

sudo apt install python3-rosdep
sudo rosdep init

Install dependencies using rosdep.

cd ~/ros2_ws
rosdep update
sudo apt upgrade
rosdep install --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO -y

Clone and build kuka-external-control-sdk in a different workspace.

• This library is necessary for the iiQKA ExternalAPI.Control driver
• The library is not a ROS2 package, therefore a different workspace is necessary, otherwise colcon will fail to build it
• To install dependencies for your platform, check out the Requirements section of the kuka-external-control-sdk documentation.

mkdir -p ~/sdk_ws/src
cd ~/sdk_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/kroshu/kuka-external-control-sdk.git
mkdir -p ~/sdk_ws/src/kuka-external-control-sdk/kuka-external-control-sdk/build
cd ~/sdk_ws/src/kuka-external-control-sdk/kuka-external-control-sdk/build
cmake ..
make install

Build KUKA packages.

cd ~/ros2_ws
colcon build<