A Modular Robotic Arm Control Stack for Research: Franka-Interface and FrankaPy
This provides an accessible and flexible tool for robotics researchers to prototype control methods, though it is incremental as it builds on existing robot interfaces.
The authors developed a modular robotic control stack for the Franka Emika Panda robot, enabling customizable high-level commands in Python and low-level control at 1kHz, which has been used in over 5 published research papers.
We designed a modular robotic control stack that provides a customizable and accessible interface to the Franka Emika Panda Research robot. This framework abstracts high-level robot control commands as skills, which are decomposed into combinations of trajectory generators, feedback controllers, and termination handlers. Low-level control is implemented in C++ and runs at $1$kHz, and high-level commands are exposed in Python. In addition, external sensor feedback, like estimated object poses, can be streamed to the low-level controllers in real time. This modular approach allows us to quickly prototype new control methods, which is essential for research applications. We have applied this framework across a variety of real-world robot tasks in more than $5$ published research papers. The framework is currently shared internally with other robotics labs at Carnegie Mellon University, and we plan for a public release in the near future.