Introduction

Python package to interface an igus Robot Control via the CRI protocol.

Current Features

• Robot State
• Basic functions
  • Reset
  • Enable / Disable
  • Acquisition of active control
  • Override
• Referencing of
  • single axis
  • all axes
  • Set joints to zero
• Direct movements
  • Joint and relative joint
  • Cartesian
  • Cartesian base and tool relative
• Live jog
• Digital IO and global signals
• Programs
  • Upload
  • Start / Pause / Stop
• CAN Bridge
• Get Board and Motor Temperature (only board supported by ReBeL)

Getting Started

Installation

Using the library requires no additional libraries, only testing has external dependencies.

In the top directory of this repository execute pip install .

Usage

The library provides the CRIController class which is the main interface to controll the iRC. It handles the network connection and starts background threads for keep alive messages and processing of received messages. Movement functions directly return even though the move might not be finisched. If you want to wait for the move to finish, set the wait_move_finished parameter to True. Most function return a bool to check whether the execution was successful.

Typical procedure

1. Connect to iRC: CRIController.connect(...) Default IP is 192.168.3.11 with port 3920. For using the simulation in the iRC desktop software, connect to 127.0.0.1, most of the time the port in the simulation is 3921, but can be different. Have a look at the log if you are unable to connect. Check whether connection was successfull via the returned bool.
2. If you want to control the robot, acquire active control via CRIController.set_active_control(True).
3. Enable drives with CRIController.enable()
4. Wait unitl axes are ready CRIcontroller.wait_for_kinematics_ready()
5. Do some work with your robot, see API documentation for all functionality.
6. Diable drives with CRIController.disable()
7. Close connection with CRIController.close()

Robot State

The robot state is continuously sent to the computer by the iRC/ReBeL. It gets received and parsed by a background thread of the library and can be accessed via CRIController.robot_state which always holds the last updated state. For descriptions of the field of the robot state please refer to the HTML docs.

Examples

See examples directory.

Tests

This repository provides pytests for the message parser. They require pytest and pytest-cov, which can be installed via pip install -r requirements.txt. To run the tests (including coverage) execute the following command: pytest -vv --cov=cri_lib --cov-report term-missing tests.