FlexBE ROS 2 Control

This package provides at least one FlexBE state implementation for each of the provided ros2_control actions and services. This encompasses the controller manager and the individual controllers

Minimum test set up

On clean ROS 2 system workspace, you need to clone:

• flexbe_ros2_control (main)

The developed states and behaviors are intended to be executed using the FlexBE behavior engine. This requires installing:

• flexbe_behavior_engine (ros2-devel)
• flexbe_webui (main) The FlexBE Behavior Engine and WebUI should be v4.1.2 or later.

This package has been tested on ROS 2 Jazzy, Kilted, and Rolling.

After cloning the relevant repositories, build and source the workspace:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
colcon build --symlink-install --packages-up-to flexbe_ros2_control
source install/setup.bash

Package Documentation

The developed state implementations are provided within the flexbe_ros2_control_flexbe_states package.

Related Publications

For further information, this system is described in

• I. G. Conner and D. C. Conner, “Flexible Manipulation for ROS 2,” in Proc. 2026 IEEE Int. Conf. Electro/Information Technology (EIT), La Crosse, WI, USA, May 21–23, 2026, to be published.

An integrated demonstration as described in the paper can be found at flexbe_ur_demo.

This work serves as an update and extension to the original Flexible Manipulation package developed for ROS 1:

• D. C. Conner, D. Catherman, S. Enders, J. Gates and J. Gu, "Flexible Manipulation: Finite State Machine-based Collaborative Manipulation," SoutheastCon 2018, St. Petersburg, FL, USA, 2018, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/SECON.2018.8478933.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{FlexBEManipulation2,
  author    = {Conner, Ian G. and Conner, David C.},
  title     = {Flexible Manipulation for ROS 2},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology (EIT)},
  address   = {La Crosse, WI, USA},
  month     = may,
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {To be published}
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{8478933,
  author={Conner, David C. and Catherman, Davis and Enders, Shannon and Gates, Julie and Gu, Jenny},
  booktitle={SoutheastCon 2018},
  title={Flexible Manipulation: Finite State Machine-based Collaborative Manipulation},
  year={2018},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-8},
  doi={10.1109/SECON.2018.8478933}}