mc_franka

Interface between libfranka and mc_rtc. It provides multi-robot support and connect mc_panda devices to their libfranka counterpart.

Dependencies

This package requires:

mc_panda

You will also need the linux-libc-dev package on Ubuntu and Debian systems.

Usage

Make sure the system is setup properly to work with the robot
Install this project's dependencies
Install this project (cmake/make/make install)
Make sure your user account has sufficient memory limits

For that last point, you want to edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add the following line:

USERNAME - memlock 1000000000

Then log-out and log-in, you can confirm the new limit is active by running:

ulimit -l

Your mc_rtc configuration file (typically ~/.config/mc_rtc/mc_rtc.yaml) should contain the following lines:

# General mc_rtc configuration to run a panda controller at 1kHz
MainRobot: PandaDefault # Or PandaHand/PandaFoot/PandaPump according to the end-effector installed on the robot
Enabled: YourController
Timestep: 0.001

# Set a LogPolicy suitable for real-time
LogPolicy: threaded

# Franka specific configuration
Franka:
  ControlMode: Position # Can be: Position/Velocity/Torque
  panda_default: # Name of the robot in the controller
    ip: 172.16.0.2 # IP of the robot
  panda_2: # Name of an extra panda in the controller
    ip: 172.16.1.2
  # Actuated robots that are not controlled via mc_franka
  ignored: [env/door, env/box]

Run the program:

MCFrankaControl

You can also provide an additional configuration file (to swap between different network configurations easily for example):

MCFrankaControl -f conf.yaml

Known issues

MCFrankaControl will not pick up on newly installed libraries. To work-around this issue, run the following command after installing a new module:

sudo ldconfig

MCFrankaControl will not pick up ROS libraries. If you're using mc_rtc's ROS plugin, create a file /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ros.conf with content:

/opt/ros/noetic/lib

It seems that this change will only be picked up after reboot.

Video presentation

A video demonstrating panda motion generation and simultaneous pump actuation employing this implementation is available here:

Reference

Writing code takes time. If this implementation is useful for your research, please cite the related publication:

@INPROCEEDINGS{Dehio2021ICRA,
  title={Robot-Safe Impacts with Soft Contacts Based on Learned Deformations}, 
  author={Dehio, Niels and Kheddar, Abderrahmane},
  booktitle={IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation},
  pages={1357-1363},
  year={2021},
  pdf = {https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02973947/document},
  url = {https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02973947}
}