I've tried to understand the difference between the two ROS Universal Robot drivers and decide which one to use. So far, I'm mainly confused. As I am new to ROS and robot control I'd appreciate any explanation and hints where to start looking for more details.
From what I've seen, there are two Universal Robot ROS drivers available
(1) https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot
(2) https://github.com/UniversalRobots/Universal_Robots_ROS_Driver
with (1) being "supplemented" by (3) https://github.com/fmauch/universal_robot/tree/calibration_devel.
(1) wasn't updated in while whereas (2) seems to get regular updates. Yet (3) seems to suggest that (1) is still being worked on (see https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot/issues/573 as well). Which one is the "active" one? Which one should be used for which use case?
It also seems to me that I can't use (2) with gazebo. However, as I said, I'm new to ROS and might be misunderstanding something entirely. What I'd like to be able to do is simulate an UR10e to develop my application within gazebo and then swap to the real robot as transparently as possible.
Thanks to all the maintainers of the UR ROS drivers (from both/all repos :))!
The ROS-Industrial set of drivers was the original community driven drivers, started back in 2012. While sparsely updated compared to back then, since it has the force & name of ROS Industrial, the community is still actively submitting issues, PR, and they are (slowly) getting merged in, as needed.
The Universal Robotics drivers were started back in 2016, as the company's official ROS support, with support from ROS Industrial for the "modernization" of the drivers. It's seeing a ton of active development & upkeep, as there are dedicated people to maintaining just this repo & drivers.
They are both active, and functionally, they likely both work for what you're trying to do (since what you want seems simple or solved). Once the driver is written, if the device doesn't change, the driver doesn't need to. For example, the older ROS Industrial has a bunch of documentation (possibly old but still good) on using the drivers with Gazebo, and drivers for UR 10e (a very common device), so that would be sufficient for your needs. If you get done what you need to get done, that's fine.
As for the UR official drivers, they are (with ROS Industrial group's support) the "new" and "modern" drivers, to extend the functionality from the older drivers; I suppose I should be recommending you to use these, but they are still work-in-progress. If there are features/limitations in the old drivers that you need, they should be fixed in the modern drivers. To not date this reply too much, the exact coverage is constantly increasing, and the support should be quicker than the old drivers. Eventually, full functionality and more will be done through this "modern" branch; for example, ROS2 support will/should not be added to the older ROS Industrial drivers.