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Franka Emika Panda Simulator

⚠️ This simulator has been archived in favor of Ignition Gazebo ⚠️

Gazebo has reached its end-of-life and has been superseeded by Ignition. Consequentially, I migrated this simulator to Ignition and the new source code to run simulations can be found in a new repository: https://github.com/FirefoxMetzger/panda-ignition-sim

The purpose of this repo is to provide an easy-access simulator for the Franka Emika Panda robot. It does so using Gazebo, ROS1, and Docker. This allows to quickly start and stop a simulator without having to struggle too much setting up dependencies. It also allows to run multiple simulators in parallel (with or without GUI) to explore learning based approaches to robot control.

Features

  • Easy setup to control the robot in python (rospy)
  • Process isolation to allow multiple simulators on a single node (no GUI)
  • Freely configurable (and scriptable) world
  • Easy migration and sharing
  • Runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux

Know of any features that could be added? Found a bug? Please open an issue in this repo. Additionally, if you like this repo, consider giving it a star. Positive feedback lets me know that there is interest in this topic, and I will do more work like this.

Installation

You should have Docker, Docker-compose, and git installed on your system before installing this Simulator. Each project is heavily in use and there are tons of good tutorials online.

First install and build the images:

git clone https://github.com/FirefoxMetzger/panda_gazebo_sim.git 
docker-compose build

ROS is a fairly large image, and we are compiling some code during the build. The first build may take a bit longer while caches are being populated.

If you wish to use the Gazebo GUI to show the world and the robot moving around in it, you will have to share your display with the docker container running Gazebo.

On Linux

The ROS Docker documentation has a section on how to set this up. You will have to decide for the level of security; if you are just briefly playing around with it, the first option may suffice. If you are planning something more sophisticated, you may wish to use the options listed further down.

On Windows

On Windows it depends a bit on how you run Docker for Windows. On a resonably modern system you will have access to WSL, and I highly recommend you use this as a backend to run docker containers.

To forward the GUI from docker's linux host to Windows, you will have to (for now) perform X11 forwarding using a 3d party program. Several good options exist and in the near future this step will become obsolete as WSL annonoced that it will add GUI support. You can get an overview of your options here, though I think that the best option currently is to use vcXsrv.

Web Client

A feature that I am working on currently is to add GzWeb to the stack. This will make using a GUI much simpler, because it will run directly in your browser of choice.

Workflows

Scripting

docker-compose run rospy

This will start the simulator in the background and drop you into a shell within the ROS ecosystem. The scripts folder of this repo will be mounted into the shell's container and you can run the python scripts inside to control the robot. Take a look at the examples and feel free to add scripts based on your needs.

RViZ (requires GUI)

docker-compose run rviz

This will start the simulator in the background and launch RViZ. You can then control the simulated robot by planning movements in RViZ.

Clean-Up

docker-compose down

This will clean up any residuals and temorary files created by the simulator, such as dangling containers, volumes, virtual networks, etc.

Configuration

There are several useful configuration options for the simulator. These are set by either (a) temorarily overwriting the default values set in the docker-compose file (see below), or (b) permanently adjusting the docker-compose.

Turning off the GUI

TODO: Write documentation

Multiple Simulators (process-level parallelization)

TODO: Write documentation

Changing Worlds/Environments

TODO: Write documentation

Your own Gazebo world

TODO: Update Documentation

To rock your own gazebo world mount your custom worlds and models directories in the locations where they are stored in the image:

docker run \
    --volume="<absolute/path/to/your/panda.world>:/catkin_ws/src/panda_gazebo/worlds/" \
    --volume="<absolute/path/to/your/models/folder/>:/catkin_ws/src/panda_gazebo/models" \
    panda_gazebo_sim

Keep in mind that the world file has to be called panda.world.

Other repos you may find useful

Official Franka Emika ROS Package A more sophisticated Panda Simulator Another Panda Simulator