drake-franka-driver

Drake-compatible LCM driver for the Franka PANDA research robot. This driver uses the Franka Control Interface and is designed for use with the Drake planning and control toolbox (currently up to the 2020/05/30 build).

Prerequisites

This C++ driver depends on drake and drake-lcmtypes. You may use our drake-torch images or install drake with the following.

curl -SL https://drake-packages.csail.mit.edu/drake/nightly/drake-20200530-bionic.tar.gz | tar -xzC /opt
cd /opt/drake/share/drake/setup && yes | ./install_prereqs

See drake-shambhala for more examples.

You also need the LCM library.

git clone https://github.com/lcm-proj/lcm
cd lcm && mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake ..
make install -j 12

drake has deprecated some lcmtypes needed here. The robot_msgs repo has a copy of them; only the headers in include/lcmtypes are needed. See .circleci/config.yml and CMakeLists.txt for details.

Builidng the driver

git clone --recursive https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/drake-franka-driver.git`
drake-franka-driver/setup.sh

See the beginning of setup.sh for more flags.

Running the driver

Once built, the executable drake-franka-driver can be found in the build/ directory. In order to run the driver, execute:

drake-franka-driver <robot_name> <robot_ip_address>

where the default robot_name is franka_0 and the default IP is 192.168.200.0. This enables multiple robots to be run on the same network.

Communicating with the robot

Sending commands to the robot from a drake program

The driver listens for commands on the <robot_name>_cmd LCM channel. By default this is franka_0_cmd.

listening to the robot response

The drake-franka-driver reports the robot status on the <robot_name>_status lcm channel. By default this is set to franka_0_status. Status is reported in a franka_status struct.

Starting driver on NUC remotely

In our implementation, the NUC runs this driver to talk to the Franka Controller. There are 3 ways to start the driver: either using di start core:franka command on the beast computer, using franka command directly on the beast computer, or manually starting the driver on the NUC. See also here: https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/wiki/wiki/Running-Candy-Demo#starting-drake-franka-driver-manually-to-debug

franka command

There is a command called franka which is run on the Beast Computer (this is what di start core:franka callsunder the hood): https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/deploy/blob/master/franka On the NUC, there is a crontab which runs on startup: https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/deploy/blob/master/robot_cron/start_docker_and_driver_servers.sh This will:

make sure a docker is running and all code is built
start up the LCM servers for both Franka and AA https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/fullstack/blob/master/src/run_driver_servers.sh

The LCM server https://github.com/DexaiRobotics/drake-franka-driver/blob/master/scripts/franka_server.py will listen to LCM commands from the franka command on the beast computer, and start up the actual driver when requested.