Franka FR3 Arm Control with ROS 2 + Ignition Gazebo (ROS 2 Humble)

A simulation environment for the Franka FR3 robotic arm with a wrist-mounted Intel RealSense D435 camera, built on ROS 2 Humble and Ignition Gazebo Fortress. Includes ros2_control integration, MoveIt2 motion planning, and a Cartesian ellipse trajectory demo.

Features

• Franka FR3 7-DOF arm in Ignition Gazebo with gz_ros2_control
• Wrist-mounted RealSense D435 (official realsense2_description mesh, looking down the grip axis)
• RGB + depth streams bridged to ROS via ros_gz_bridge
• Joint trajectory controller for the arm + single-finger position controller for the gripper
• MoveIt2 motion planning (move_group + RViz MotionPlanning plugin)
• Cartesian path demo: end-effector traces a 3D ellipse in the base frame

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 22.04
• ROS 2 Humble - Installation Guide
• Ignition Gazebo Fortress
• libfranka 0.13+ (sudo apt install ros-humble-libfranka)

Installation

Clone the workspace

cd ~
git clone git@github.com:vbwanere/franka-fr3-arm-control.git
cd franka-panda-arm-control

The repo is the workspace root; it ships src/ with franka_description, franka_ros2, and panda_pick_bringup already in place. realsense2_description is pulled via apt.

Install dependencies

sudo apt install \
  ros-humble-ros-gz \
  ros-humble-gz-ros2-control \
  ros-humble-realsense2-description \
  ros-humble-moveit \
  ros-humble-libfranka
cd ~/franka-panda-arm-control
rosdep install --from-paths src -y --ignore-src

Build

colcon build --symlink-install
source install/setup.bash

Running the Simulation

Terminal 1 — Robot + Gazebo + Controllers

source install/setup.bash
ros2 launch panda_pick_bringup pick_and_place.launch.py

Wait until you see Configured and activated fr3_arm_controller. Gazebo and an RViz with the camera feeds will open.

Terminal 2 — Bowling

source install/setup.bash
ros2 run panda_pick_bringup bowling_joint.py

Terminal 3 — MoveIt2 (Optional)

source install/setup.bash
ros2 launch panda_pick_bringup moveit_demo.launch.py

Wait until you see You can start planning now!. A second RViz opens with the MotionPlanning plugin — drag the end-effector and hit Plan & Execute.

Gripper

# Open
ros2 topic pub --once /fr3_gripper_controller/commands std_msgs/msg/Float64MultiArray "data: [0.04]"
# Close
ros2 topic pub --once /fr3_gripper_controller/commands std_msgs/msg/Float64MultiArray "data: [0.0]"

Note: only the left finger animates in sim due to a known gz_ros2_control mimic-joint limitation on Humble. The right finger tracks correctly on real hardware via libfranka.

Cleanup Between Runs

Stale Gazebo processes block the next launch. Run between sessions:

pkill -9 -f "ign gazebo"; pkill -9 -f "ruby /usr/bin/ign"; sleep 2

Package Layout

• panda_pick_bringup/ — project bringup (launch files, config, URDF with D435 camera, ellipse trajectory script)
• franka_description/ — official Franka URDF and meshes (FER, FR3, FP3 variants)
• franka_ros2/ — official Franka ROS 2 stack (hardware interface, MoveIt config, controllers, gripper)
• franka_task_planning/ — placeholder for AprilTag detection pipeline (msgs from old ROS 1 project)

TODO

• Custom controller — implement a torque-level controller (e.g. computed-torque or impedance) as a ros2_control plugin, replacing the simple position interface for more realistic dynamics.
• Custom Gazebo world — model the original lab scene (workbench, dispenser, turntable, scoring platforms) as a native Ignition SDF.
• Gripper sim fix — work around the gz_ros2_control mimic-joint bug so the right finger also animates in simulation.
• Real hardware bring-up — use franka_bringup's franka.launch.py against the FCI to run the same MoveIt and trajectory code on a physical FR3.
• AprilTag pipeline — port the detection code from the old ROS 1 project into franka_task_planning, run on the live /camera/color/image_raw feed, and publish detected poses in fr3_link0 for pick planning.