Industrial robots are widely used in modern industry fields because of the development of robot technology. In robot palletizing or bin-picking application, robot needs to automatically generate path for achieving robot picking and placing operation even if there exist obstacles. This project is to design and test a robot system that can move without collisions in a changeable environment. And communication is realized between two computers through an industrial communication protocol.

ROS has been chosen as a simulation platform for the robot path planning simulation as it has some independent advantages, like open-source, supporting multiple programming languages, integrating a lot of open source tools and advanced algorithms. ROS MoveIt! software is used for motion planning, operation control, 3D perception, kinematic solution, collision detection, and so on. Through RRT method, robot path planning is achieved and through Flexible Collision Library, collision detection is achieved. For robot system test experiments and results, taking ABB IRB 2600 robot as a test industrial robot, a robot simulation system in ROS is designed and set up to realize obstacles free picking and placing path planning task of the robot.

Firstly, for obtaining external obstacles information, Kinect V1 camera is used and calibrated for eliminating distortion and obtains colour image and depth image. Secondly, by using Point Cloud Library, the images are transformed to point cloud images with filtering for eliminating noise. Thirdly, by using OctoMap library, the scene including obstacles are created to 3D occupancy map. Furtherly, according to the map, robot obstacles avoidance pickup and placement operation is achieved in ROS.

Finally, for testing and evaluating the system, the robot model, a pickup object and an obstacle model are created in ABB RobotStudio software which is the same as ROS's and further achieves co-simulation motion in ROS and ABB RobotStudio by ROS TCP/IP socket program. By running path planning in ROS, the robot achieves obstacle avoidance path planning and pickup and placement operation in ABB RobotStudio.