Franka Emika Research 3 User Guide

Owned by Karen Chiang
Last updated: May 14, 2024
3 min read

 

 

1. Switch on the Franka

  1. Press the power switch on the backside of the Control

2. Network setup:

  • Connection between the Control and the workstation:

  1. The workstation’s network setting has already been configured, so you simply need to connect the workstation and the Control with an ethernet cable

  2. Select network Wired connection 1

  3. Open a browser, *Desk can be accessed via https://172.16.0.2, although you will see a certificate warning in your browser

  4. Unlock joints

  5. Activate FCI (make sure the operations mode is execution instead of programming. The status indicator should turn green when in execution mode)

*Desk is Franka Emika‘s web-based, intuitive and graphical programming and user interface

 

3. Switch off the Franka

  1. First, shut down the system by clicking the option “shut-down” in the sidebar of Desk. The safety locking system is activated, and Franka will shut down.

  2. Then, use the power switch on the back of the Control to disconnect Franka from the mains eletricity.

Be aware: after using the switch to power the system off, please ensure to allow adequate waiting time (i.e. in the order of ~ 1 minute) before using it to power the system on again

 

 

 

 

Draft points:

The steps to use Franka emika and connect with ROS

  1. Connect the machine running ROS master and the controller with an ethernet cable

  2. go to 172.16.0.2 to go to Desk . (Desk account: username: admin, pwd: VUsail@NU11), local workstation network configuration: https://frankaemika.github.io/docs/getting_started.html#linux-workstation-network-configuration

  3. and first unlock joints

  4. and click activate FCI (at N/A)

  5. how to build real time kernel (https://github.com/frankaemika/libfranka/issues/62 )

  6. after building it, make sure the secure boot is disabled, see https://frankaemika.github.io/docs/troubleshooting.html#troubleshooting-realtime-kernel

  7. The lab laptop Katana 067526 with rt kernel installed, username: sail, password: VUsail@NU11

 

 

Overview of the status indicators:

panda_indicators.png

ROS connection setup (not actively maintained, as we don’t use ROS for now):

The current recommended workflow for controlling the real robot with ROS involves using the lab laptop as the ROS master and your personal laptop to send ROS commands, instead of directly running ROS master on your machine. This approach is considered preferable because installing a real-time Linux kernel is necessary to use libfranka, and the installation process might not be straightforward. The lab laptop Katana 067526 (referred to as the workstation here) already has this kernel installed. If you prefer reducing communication latency by eliminating the lab laptop as a ROS master and directly using your own machine as a workstation, you have the option to install the real-time kernel on your own machine. Instructions for this process can be found here:https://frankaemika.github.io/docs/installation_linux.html#setting-up-the-real-time-kernel.

  • Connection between the workstation and your laptop over the same network (here we use the lab LAN TP-Link_2104)

1. On the workstation

Open the .bashrc file, change the ROS_IP to your current IP, make sure you connect to the same network the ROS master is connecting to

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://10.0.0.194:11311 export ROS_IP=your_ip

2. On your laptop

Open the .bashrc file, and add the following lines

export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://10.0.0.194:11311 export ROS_IP=your_ip

Please make sure the ROS master IP is correct as well. At the time of writing, the IP is 10.0.0.194

To test if you have complete, bi-directional connectivity between the workstation and your laptop:

Run rostopic list to see if you get a list of all available topics without an error. And, to check if you can communicate with the ROS master, run rostopic echo /topic_name. If you can only see the topics list but can’t echo the topic, there might be a hostname resolution problem. To resolve this, add the ROS master to the /etc/hosts on your laptop (client). E.g.,

10.0.0.194 user-Katana-17-B12VGK

You can run hostname to get the hostname of ROS master