industrial-arm-runtime

A small, opinionated, human-readable language for describing robot intent.

urml.dev

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urml-industrial-arm-runtime

ROS-Industrial / MoveIt 2 reference runtime for URML — one first-class adapter per arm vendor: ABB, FANUC, KUKA, YASKAWA, Universal Robots, Franka Emika.

An industrial manipulator is a fixed-base arm. Its load-bearing URML primitives are grasp / release (a gripper action) and move_to (an end-effector move via MoveIt 2). That dispatch shape is identical to the one the ROS 2 runtime's RclpyAdapter already implements, so the substrate plumbing is single-sourced: each brand adapter composes a RclpyAdapter rather than re-implementing MoveIt 2. The per-brand surface is still real and first-class — distinct classes, distinct default configs (each vendor's ROS-Industrial action-server conventions), distinct not-supported tag. "One adapter per brand", no duplicated substrate code.

Method coverage

Full ROSAdapter Protocol. Supported on a bare fixed-base arm, delegated to the composed adapter:

URML primitive	Mapping
grasp / release	control_msgs/GripperCommand action
move_to / hover	MoveIt 2 move to a named pose (/move_action)
measure	single reading (joint state / wrench)
wait_for	block on a cell signal / threshold
wait	dwell in place for a duration
report	structured status upstream

The primitives a bare arm cannot serve — dock, detect, scan, capture, speak, listen, and the drone trio take_off / land / return_to_home — return SubstrateResult(success=False, reason="not_supported_on_industrial_arm[<brand>]: ...") rather than raising. This is the same pattern PX4Adapter uses for not_supported_on_bare_autopilot. A work-cell that pairs an arm with a vision system dispatches detection through a companion adapter, exactly as the drone stack pairs flight with a ROS 2 companion; the URML program, manifest, and validator are unchanged and unaware.

rclpy is lazy

Importing this package works on every host (Windows included): the rclpy import lives inside RclpyAdapter and only fires when an adapter is constructed. Constructing a brand adapter therefore needs a sourced ROS 2 environment — the ROS-Industrial driver plus MoveIt 2 for that arm. There is no installable extra: rclpy ships with a ROS 2 distribution, not from PyPI (same as urml-ros2-runtime).

Install

pip install -e reference/industrial-arm-runtime

Use

from urml_industrial_arm_runtime import AbbAdapter

# Brand default config (ROS-Industrial conventions); override with an
# AdapterConfig for a specific cell's action servers.
with AbbAdapter() as adapter:
    result = adapter.send_manipulation_goal(action="grasp", force_n=15.0)
    assert result.success

Through the conformance suite (the same hook every URML runtime uses):

from urml_conformance import ConformanceRunner
from urml_industrial_arm_runtime import BRAND_ADAPTERS

runner = ConformanceRunner(adapter_factory=lambda: BRAND_ADAPTERS["abb"]())
report = runner.run()

Status

v0.1 (this release):

• Six first-class brand adapters (AbbAdapter, FanucAdapter, KukaAdapter, YaskawaAdapter, UrAdapter, FrankaAdapter) over a shared IndustrialArmAdapter core that composes RclpyAdapter. UR (Denmark/Teradyne) is the dominant cobot; Franka (Germany) is the dominant research arm and the educational-community flywheel — both pass the default US-federal policy.
• BRAND_ADAPTERS name→class registry for config-driven selection (CI matrices, the conformance adapter_factory).
• Hermetic unit tests: every brand, every delegated primitive, every not-supported sentinel, the conformance hook, runtime_checkable Protocol conformance, and context-manager teardown — no ROS 2 install required.
• Gated .github/workflows/industrial-arm-integration.yml (matrixed abb/fanuc/kuka/yaskawa) running the existing conformance/fixtures/industrial/pick_red_positive fixture through each brand adapter against a ROS 2 + MoveIt 2 sim, plus a gated tests/integration/ scaffold. Modelled on ros2-integration.yml; first runs per brand are calibration runs by design, not regression signals.

Why a vision companion. GraspArgs.target is a required VarRef — URML grasp always acts on a detected target, so any pick-place program contains a detect step. A bare fixed-base arm has no onboard perception (returns not_supported_on_industrial_arm), exactly as a bare PX4 autopilot has none. The gated test pairs the brand arm with a vision companion via the already-tested generic urml_px4_runtime.CompositeAdapter (arm owns motion/manipulation/report; companion owns detection) — no industrial-specific composite code is duplicated. This mirrors the drone stack's flight+companion split.

Follow-ups (not yet):

• Per-brand US-compliant provenance manifests (ABB Sweden, FANUC/YASKAWA Japan, KUKA Germany). v0.1 reuses the existing compliant industrial_cell manifest; the profile README already documents that ABB/FANUC/KUKA controllers pass the default US-federal policy.
• A detection source wired into the sim so the gated detect step resolves against the real RclpyAdapter companion (part of the documented first-run calibration).

Core Commitment

This runtime is part of the Core Commitment. It will always be Apache 2.0. No vendor coupling, no cloud dependency, no enterprise edition.

Related documents

• /spec/profiles/industrial/ — the profile this runtime targets.
• /spec/layer-1-hal/ — manifest schema (manipulation fields).
• /conformance/ — the test suite that decides conformance.
• /reference/ros2-runtime/ — the composed substrate engine (RclpyAdapter).
• /reference/px4-runtime/ — the sibling runtime this package's structure mirrors.