ROS End-Effector: A Hardware-Agnostic Software and Control Framework for Robotic End-Effectors

In recent years, several robotic end-effectors have been developed and made available in the market. Nevertheless, their adoption in industrial context is still limited due to a burdensome integration, which strongly relies on customized software modules specific for each end-effector. Indeed, to enable the functionalities of these end-effectors, dedicated interfaces must be developed to consider the different end-effector characteristics, like finger kinematics, actuation systems, and communication protocols. To face the challenges described above, we present ROS End-Effector, an open-source framework capable of accommodating a wide range of robotic end-effectors of different grasping capabilities (grasping, pinching, or independent finger dexterity) and hardware characteristics. The ROS End-Effector framework, rather than controlling each end-effector in a different and customized way, allows to mask the physical hardware differences and permits to control the end-effector using a set of high-level grasping primitives automatically extracted. By leveraging on hardware agnostic software modules including hardware abstraction layer (HAL), application programming interfaces (APIs), simulation tools and graphical user interfaces (GUIs), ROS End-Effector effectively facilitates the integration of diverse end-effector devices. The proposed framework capabilities in supporting different robotics end-effectors are demonstrated in both simulated and real hardware experiments using a variety of end-effectors with diverse characteristics, ranging from under-actuated grippers to anthropomorphic robotic hands. Finally, from the user perspective, the manuscript provides a set of examples about the use of the framework showing its flexibility in integrating a new end-effector module.