Designing industrial robot client nodes

The industrial_robot_client package contains various classes to implement industrial robot client nodes. The main functionalities that a client should have include updating the robot's current state from the robot controller, and also sending joint position messages to the controller. There are two main nodes that are responsible for getting the robot state and sending joint position values:

• The robot_state node: This node is responsible for publishing the robot's current position, status, and so on.
• The joint_trajectory node: This node subscribes to the robot's command topic and sends the joint position commands to the robot controller via the simple message protocol.

The following figure gives the list of APIs provided by the industrial robot client:

Figure 15.17 – A list of the industrial robot client APIs

We can briefly go through these APIs and their functionalities, as follows...