Setting up communication between real and virtual robot

Note that the RTDE interface is only for exchanging robot IO and status information such as joint values. It doesn’t allow you to directly command the robot to move to certain pose for example.
The Universal Robots RTDE connectivity in VC Robotics and Premium is easy to use with configuration through UI and has good performance but it is of course limited to the functionality of that RTDE interface on the UR controller.

To give such commands to the UR robot controller you’ll need to use the TCP/IP “primary” or “secondary” interface to send URScript commands from VC to the UR controller. This can be implemented as a Python script in VC.
https://www.universal-robots.com/articles/ur-articles/remote-control-via-tcpip/

In addition if you need to e.g. start or stop robot programs on the UR controller you need to use the “dashboard server” interface. This can be also done pretty easily from a Python script in VC.
https://www.universal-robots.com/articles/ur-articles/dashboard-server-cb-series-port-29999/

1 Like