System Requirements#

WMX Motion Control Engine#

The WMX motion control engine is a high-performance, real-time motion control platform developed by MOVENSYS. It provides deterministic servo control over EtherCAT fieldbus and serves as the hardware abstraction layer between ROS2 and physical servo drives.

Key features:

  • Real-time EtherCAT master – manages cyclic communication with servo drives at deterministic update rates

  • Multi-axis coordination – supports synchronized motion across 6+ axes with cubic spline interpolation (CSplinePos)

  • Shared-memory architecture – multiple ROS2 nodes connect to the same WMX engine instance through independent device handles, enabling concurrent state reading and command execution

  • Hardware abstraction – provides a unified C++ API (CoreMotion, AdvancedMotion, Io, Ecat, WMX3Api) so ROS2 nodes remain robot-agnostic; only configuration files differ between robots

The WMX runtime (LMX) must be installed at /opt/lmx/ before building or running the WMX ROS2 packages. See Install Dependencies for verification steps.

Operating System#

OS

Version

Notes

Ubuntu

22.04 LTS (Jammy)

Primary development and testing platform

Ubuntu

24.04 LTS (Noble)

Supported with ROS2 Jazzy

Note

Root (sudo) access is required at runtime. The WMX motion control engine and EtherCAT communication require kernel-level access to the network interface.

ROS2 Distribution#

Distribution

Ubuntu Version

Platform

ROS2 Humble Hawksbill

Ubuntu 22.04

NVIDIA Jetson Orin, Intel x86_64

ROS2 Jazzy Jalisco

Ubuntu 24.04

Intel x86_64

The C++ standard required is C++17 (set in CMakeLists.txt).

Hardware Requirements#

Compute Platform:

Component

Minimum

Recommended

CPU

x86_64 or ARM64 (aarch64)

Intel Core i7 or NVIDIA Jetson Orin

RAM

4 GB

8 GB or more

Storage

10 GB free

20 GB free (including ROS2 + MoveIt2)

GPU

Not required for base operation

NVIDIA GPU with CUDA for Isaac cuMotion

Tested Platforms:

  • Intel x86_64 – Desktop/industrial PC (referenced as mvsk in configs)

  • NVIDIA Jetson Orin – Edge AI platform (referenced as mic-733ao in configs)

EtherCAT Network Interface:

  • Dedicated Ethernet NIC for the EtherCAT fieldbus (cannot be shared with regular network traffic)

  • The EtherCAT port connects directly to the first servo drive in the daisy chain

Warning

The EtherCAT Ethernet port is not a standard TCP/IP connection. Do not configure it with a regular IP address. The WMX engine controls this interface at the raw Ethernet level.

Supported Robot:

  • Dobot CR3A – 6-DOF collaborative robot with EtherCAT servo drives and pneumatic gripper

The architecture is robot-agnostic for any 6-DOF manipulator with EtherCAT servo drives. See wmx_ros2_package for details on adapting to other robots.

Supported Models & Platforms#

Model

DOF

Payload

Status

Dobot CR3A

6

16.5 kg

Fully supported. Configuration files and WMX parameters included.

Platform

Architecture

ROS2 Distro

Config File

Intel x86_64 PC

x86_64

Humble / Jazzy

intel_manipulator_config_cr3a.yaml

NVIDIA Jetson Orin

aarch64

Humble

orin_manipulator_config_cr3a.yaml