  The Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a software framework, and ecosystem
of knowledge and community supplied resources to rapidly develop and prototype
intelligent robotics applications. By standardizing communication,
configuration and invocation of software modules, ROS facilitates reuse of
device-driver and algorithm implementations. Using existing implementations of
functionality allows users to assemble their robotics application from tested
and known-good capabilities. Despite the efforts of the ROS-Industrial
consortium and projects like ROSIN to bring ROS to industrial applications and
integrate industrial hardware, we observe a lack of options to generically
integrate basic physical IO. In this work we lay out and provide a solution to
this problem by implementing a generic Modbus/TCP device driver for ROS.
