Franka

Tutorials: Franka Robotic Arm

Franka Research 3´s robot system includes the Arm and its Control. The force sensitive and agile Arm features 7 DOF with torque sensors at each joint, industrial-grade pose repeatability of +/- 0.1 mm and negligible path deviation even at high velocities. It comes with a payload of 3 kg, a reach of 855 mm and a workspace coverage of 94.5 %.
FCI (Franka Control Interface) is the ideal interface to explore low-level programming and control schemes, providing the current status of the robot and enabling its direct torque control, at 1 kHz. On top of the C++ interface libfranka, integration with the most popular ecosystems ROS, ROS2 and MATLAB & Simulink is available!

Tutorial for Case Study 1:


The Franka Emika Panda is a highly versatile robot arm that can be used in a wide range of applications. It is compatible with the Robot Operating System (ROS), which is an open-source framework for developing robot software. This document will guide you through the steps required to set up the Franka Panda with ROS, including how to turn on the power button, how to unlock the robot joints, and how to use the FCI mode to control the robot.


Step 1: Turn on the Power Button

The first step is to turn on the power button of the robot. The power button is located on the panel of the robot's control box. Press the button to turn on the robot.


Step 2: Access the Franka Panda Interface

Next, open a web browser and navigate to the Franka Panda interface by entering the following URL: https://172.16.0.2/desk/. This will take you to the Franka Panda desktop.


Step 3: Unlock the Robot Joints

Before you can control the robot, you need to unlock the robot joints. To do this, select the 'Menu' option on the Franka Panda interface and then choose 'Activate FCI' from the dropdown menu.


Step 4: Understand Joint Control Modes

There are four joint control modes that you need to be aware of:

Step 5: Use FCI Mode to Control

Once you have activated FCI mode, you can start to control the robot. Use the mode buttons to switch between the four joint control modes mentioned above.


Step 6: Refer to the Panda Robot APIs and the Franka-ROS package

Useful resource:

Panda robot APIs:

https://projects.saifsidhik.page/panda_robot/DOC.html

A Python interface package built over the Franka ROS Interface package for controlling and handling the Franka Emika Panda robot. Also works directly with Panda Simulator


Good luck with your experiments!



Case Study: Pick and Place Task


To demonstrate the capability of the IoHIRT framework to assist humans' daily life, we evaluate the framework on one of the most common tasks, i.e. the pick and place task. This task requires a robotic arm to approach a target object, control the gripper to grasp the object in hand, and relocate the object to a target area. A Franka Emika Panda arm with seven joints is used for experiments. The robot arm is equipped with a soft gripper to perform the pick and place task.  A  camera was used for the robot to observe the operating scene while the real-time images were sent to the cloud server and visualized through the user interface, which provides visual feedback to human operators and enables human-in-the-loop control. 

The controlling PC is connected to the robot arm through Ethernet. The PC runs with a real-time kernel in Ubuntu 20 system. The robot control commands can be received from  the cloud server through TCP socket.