Run Universal Robot Driver through Virtual Box?

[KarimHP]

Summary

Introduction to the issue

Versions

• ROS Driver version: melodic
• OS: Windows 11, running Ubuntu 18 through a virtual box

I want to install ubuntu 18 on a virtual box on my windows 11 System. Is it possible to run the UR5 ROS driver through my virtual box? The problem im seeing is that i have to change the static IP Adress and the netmask of my Ubuntu VM to match the UR5 IP. Will that work through the Virtual box or do i have to also change the static ip Adress of my Windows 11 Host System?

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[fmauch]

Sorry for the delayed answer.

I see a couple of implications here:

• I would suggest not using ubuntu 18.04 with ROS melodic, since this is end of life. Please consider using ubuntu 20.04 with ROS noetic. (Or even consider switching to ROS 2)
• Running the driver in a virtual machine will most probably cause performance problems, since the driver has pretty strict requirements regarding cycle times. Expect the driver to be occasionally disconnecting. Also see Real time benchmarking / reasoning #615 for a more detailed explanation (which is only considering different Linux setups.)
• Regarding networking: You could
  • Have your host in the same subnet as your UR, use a NAT interface for your VM and have ports 50001 to 50004 forwarded to your VM
  • You could use a bridge network device for your VM. Then, this device gets its own IP address that you can use as a remote address on your UR
• I have absolutely no knowledge about performance implications of the different network implementations mentioned above. I absolutely would not recommend running the driver in a VM, as also mentioned above. You could consider using WSL2 instead.

This is about all I can say about running the driver in a VM on windows (Though I would like to actually test it myself and make the same analyses I've done in #615 at some point...).