Section: New Results

A software architecture for the control of a 7 dof robot for the conduct of several experiment

The Franka Emika Panda robot is a 7 dof robot. Using the Robot Operating System (ROS), an experimental setup has been built to exploit this robot. The experimental setup consists in:

• the Panda robot;

• several RGBD sensors (Kinects);

• a safety laser scanner.

Dedicated algorithms have been developed to exploit the capacities of the Kinects to visualize the environment surrounding the robot and compute the distance to the closest obstacle. Several Kinects can be used simultaneously. Specific drivers have been developed to exploit the data given by the laser scanner to also determine the closest distance between a human and a robot.

Within the framework of Arcol (see 6.6) A software architecture has been developed to ease the development of different controllers. The robot can be controlled in joint position, velocity and torque using standard state-of-the-art control technique or constrained convex optimization methods. Trajectories can be easily defined, played, and modified at run time. The robot can be simulated using the GAZEBO dynamic simulator or run on the real robot with similar behaviours. All this software architecture works on a real-time patched computer.