Install Panda ROS Drivers¶

This chapter describes how to install libfranka` and franka_ros, either as binary packages or by building from source. franka_ros is only required if you want to control your robot using ROS.

For more detail follow this link.

Note

While libfranka and the franka_ros packages should work on different Linux distributions, official support is currently only provided for:

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver and ROS Melodic Morenia (requires at least libfranka 0.6.0) Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa and ROS Noetic Ninjemys (requires at least libfranka 0.8.0)

The following instructions are exemplary for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system and ROS Noetic Ninjemys. They only work in the supported environments.

Installing from the ROS repositories¶

Binary packages for libfranka and franka_ros are available from the ROS repositories. After setting up ROS Noetic, execute:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-libfranka ros-noetic-franka-ros

Building from source (recommended)¶

Before building from source, please uninstall existing installations of libfranka and franka_ros to avoid conflicts:

sudo apt remove "*libfranka*"

Building libfranka¶

To build libfranka, install the following dependencies from Ubuntu’s package manager:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake git libpoco-dev libeigen3-dev

Then, download the source code by cloning libfranka from GitHub (https://github.com/frankaemika/libfranka).

For Panda you need to clone:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/frankaemika/libfranka # only for panda
cd libfranka

By default, this will check out the newest release of libfranka. If you want to build a particular version of libfranka instead, check out the corresponding Git tag:

git checkout 0.9.2
git submodule update

The above instructions for cloning libfranka only work for Panda. For Franka Research 3 you have to clone:

In the source directory, create a build directory and run CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_TESTS=OFF ..
cmake --build .

Building the ROS packages¶

After setting up ROS Noetic, create a Catkin workspace in a directory of your choice:

cd /path/to/desired/folder
mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws
source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.sh
catkin_init_workspace src

Then clone the franka_ros repository from GitHub:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/frankaemika/franka_ros src/franka_ros

By default, this will check out the newest release of franka_ros. If you want to build a particular version of franka_ros instead, check out the corresponding Git tag:

cd src/franka_ros
git checkout noetic-devel

Install any missing dependencies and build the packages:

cd ~/catkin_ws
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro noetic -y --skip-keys libfranka
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DFranka_DIR:PATH=/path/to/libfranka/build
source devel/setup.sh

Warning

If you also installed ros-noetic-libfranka, libfranka might be picked up from /opt/ros/noetic instead of from your custom libfranka build!