The ROS-I-MTConnect Integration program has the goal of developing a bridge between MTConnect and ROS-I. The MTConnect software stack contains packages and libraries for integrating ROS and equipment or machine tools that support the MTConnect communications standard in a manufacturing environment. Similar to ROS messaging, the MTConnect communications standard describes both the semantic data definition and method of communication.

This stack is part of the ROS Industrial and MTConnect programs. It contains packages that create a bridge between ROS and the MTConnect protocols.

The installation of this stack requires both binary installations and installations from the source.

Ruby and its associated state machine library are required to run some scripts, so we have to install them:

$ sudo apt-get install ruby
$ sudo gem install statemachine

MTConnect ROS bridge and MTConnect Agent libraries will all be downloaded from the source directory as follows:

$ git clone git://github.com/mtconnect/ros_bridge.git
$ git clone git://github.com/mtconnect/cppagent.git
$ mkdir agent_build
$ cd agent_build
$ cmake ../cppagent
$ make

The following environment variables must be defined in the ~/.bashrc file:

$ export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=<source path>:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
$ export MTCONNECT_AGENT_DIR=<source path>/agent_build/agent/

The MTConnect example stack contains sample integrations between a simulated CNC and robot. The following command will start the ROS bridge, MTConnect agents, and CNC simulator:

$ roslaunch mtconnect_ros_bridge mtconnect_ros_bridge_components.launch

We can see that multiple terminal windows will be opened for the various agents and CNC simulator.