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I am just starting to know the Industrial version of ROS and could not find any documentation whether ROS supports industrial standard communication protocols. If yes please provide any documentation and if no please help me understand the concept behind it. Any alternative can also be a good start off.
AFAIK ROS does not natively support any of the listed proprietary industrial protocols. But you can find some previous work on bridging between ROS and industrial protocols, like EtherCAT. Here is a nice collection of ROS bridges to several industrial field busses.
That was helpful thank you Andre. I shall try to find out the results and post it back.
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Asked: 2017-04-26 11:57:39 -0600
Seen: 3,348 times
Last updated: Apr 26 '17
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Are you looking for support to communicate between ROS nodes using industrial fieldbuses, or just support to communicate with PLCs and other supporting equipment?
Basically, both but preferably to communicate PLCs and other supporting equipment over Fieldbus via ROS as two PLC's direct communication over fieldbuses is always possible.
Using a fieldbus as the physical / transport layer for the ROS middleware would probably not make much sense: most fieldbuses employ memory-synchronisation schemes, with memory divided up into words with addresses associated to them. While possible to use those as a generic storage pool, ..
.. it would probably not really work very well / be limited, as PLCs and other industrial hw would not be able to properly process the higher-level abstractions that ROS typically employs.
The pkgs/nodes that @Andre Volk linked to would probably be a more suitable approach.