This ROS Spotlight introduces Shadow Robot's new platform for
connecting ROS to robot hardware.
A spin-off from he Stiff-Flop Project, RoNeX is designed specially for cutting edge robotics prototyping and development. RoNeX provides a high speed, modular I/O network that fully integrates with ROS straight out of the box, accessible directly on ROS topics or within standard ROS controllers.
Utilising the industrial strenght real-time EtherCAT field-bus, RoNeX has 100Mbps of bandwidth available, and maintains a 1 kHz update rate on all channels allowing for real time joint control from a ROS Host.
To show just how easy it is to build a robot with RoNeX, Shadow has done just that in this video:
Using standard ROS packages for joint control, kinematics, path planning and visualisation, Shadow needed only ten new lines of code plus a URDF file automatically generated from Solidworks to drive the robot!
The Shadow team is releasing RoNeX with three Modules available now and are putting the final touches to a roadmap that includes motor drivers, ability to daisy chain RoNeX stacks and Dev Kits for advanced users and OEMs.
To find out more about RoNeX visit the Shadow Website.
RoNeX drivers are open source on Github and the user manual is here.
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