A Solution to the Generalized ROS Hardware IO Problem -- A Generic Modbus/TCP Device Driver for PLCs, Sensors and Actuators

The Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a software framework, and ecosystem of knowledge and community supplied resources to rapidly develop and prototype intelligent robotics applications. By standardizing communication, configuration and invocation of software modules, ROS facilitates reuse of device-driver and algorithm implementations. Using existing implementations of functionality allows users to assemble their robotics application from tested and known-good capabilities. Despite the efforts of the ROS-Industrial consortium and projects like ROSIN to bring ROS to industrial applications and integrate industrial hardware, we observe a lack of options to generically integrate basic physical IO. In this work we lay out and provide a solution to this problem by implementing a generic Modbus/TCP device driver for ROS.