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Panda Arm - Franka Emika

This repository contains the application code used to communicate with the Franka Emika arm from Drake.

Software Versions

This driver supports both FR3 (newer) and FE3 (older) Franka robots:

  • Drake: v1.45.0
  • libfranka v5 (~0.15.0): For FR3 robots with firmware v5.x
  • libfranka v4 (0.9.0): For FE3 robots with firmware v4.x
  • Pinocchio: 2.6.21 (required for libfranka v5 dynamics)
  • LCM: Latest from main branch

Building the driver

Before you begin, install the prerequisites:

sudo apt install libgflags-dev libpoco-dev

To build, run bazel build //.... This will output two versions of the driver: bazel-bin/franka-driver/franka_driver_v4 and bazel-bin/franka-driver/franka_driver_v5.

Use franka_driver_v5 for the FR-3 robots.

Running the driver

To run the driver in position mode, use the following command:

    bazel-bin/franka-driver/franka_driver_v5 --expire_sec=0.05 --robot_ip_address=<ip-addr> --control_mode=position

To run the driver in torque mode, use the following command:

bazel-bin/franka-driver/franka_driver_v5 --use_mbp --expire_sec=0.05 --robot_ip_address=<ip-addr> --control_mode=torque

To add a gripper, update the models/add_franka_control.yaml with the respective gripper.

Links

Notes

  • Be sure to read the manual, FCI docs, etc.
    • The FCI docs have excellent instructions for getting your network interface on Ubuntu set up.
  • There are two very distinct versions of Pandas: the FE3 (older) and FR3 (newer)
  • There are three versions to think about: firmware on the robot (we use v4.x and v5.x), libfranka driver software on the host PC (0.9.0 for v4.x FE3, and ~0.15.0 for v5.x FR3), and the robot model itself.

    • You should see suffixes like _v4 and _v5 for relevant libraries and binaries throughout this codebase.

    • If you use the wrong driver, you should get an error like:

        terminate called after throwing an instance of 'franka::IncompatibleVersionException'
  what():  libfranka: Incompatible library version (server version: 4, library version: 5). Please check https://frankaemika.github.io for Panda system updates or use a different version of libfranka.