// the find
ros-industrial/universal_robot
ROS-Industrial Universal Robots support (https://wiki.ros.org/universal_robot)
A ROS 1 meta-package with URDF descriptions, meshes, and MoveIt planning configs for the Universal Robots arm lineup, from UR3 through UR30. It is for people running simulation or motion planning on a UR arm under ROS 1 (Melodic or Noetic). For live hardware control, the README sends you to ur_robot_driver.
Every arm package has the same shape: config/, launch/, and tests/ with a planning test. Once one arm works, moving to another model is mostly picking a different package rather than learning a new layout. Hardware control is left to ur_robot_driver instead of being reimplemented here, so this repo stays on the description and planning side and does not own the realtime connection. The packages are on the ROS apt index, so the description and MoveIt config install without a catkin build, and the README is right to push people toward that over a source clone. Each package carries a CHANGELOG.rst, and there is a Noetic CI workflow in .github/workflows.
ROS 1 only. Melodic and Noetic are both out of support now, and nothing in this repo covers ROS 2, so starting a new project on a supported distro means finding a different repo. The install section still says releases 'will soon be' available, which reads as stale, and the source path clones the noetic-devel branch, so a source build tracks a moving target with no tag to pin to. The meshes fall under Universal Robots' graphical documentation terms, which the README concedes are not OSI open source. The BSD and Apache headers on the code do not cover them, so anyone shipping a product built on these models needs to read those terms separately. There are eleven near-identical MoveIt packages, one per arm, so a fix to a shared default such as a planner or controller setting has to be repeated in every copy. The visible listing shows no shared package to hold it once.