Franka Description Package

[peterdavidfagan]

I noticed that there is a discrepancy between the franka_description package for the ROS and ROS 2 repositories.

Are there plans to port changes? Is it worth opening a pr?

[BarisYazici]

@peterdavidfagan can you be more specific? For example, what are the features you need. So we can take a better look in the planning on Monday. If you think it's worthy of a PR, why not :)

[peterdavidfagan]

Thanks for the quick response on this @BarisYazici.

I am currently working on the rolling-devel branch for panda_moveit_config. One of the first items I came across as missing was links ("sc" links) from the URDF. Specifically the macro defined here and its usage in this xacro file help ensure compatibility with MoveIt SRDF files in panda_moveit_config where these links are used for collision checking.

This is the main item that I am looking for right now, I am building against the ROS 1 version of the description package for now. I will need to adapt what's there at some point (e.g. ros2_control tags in URDF). As I come across items I will add them here.

If I get the time I will open a PR.

[peterdavidfagan]

I have started some work on this in the following #19.

[peterdavidfagan]

I'll try to enumerate item/changes in bullet points or the pr commit history but another requirement is for the panda_hand_controller's ros2_control tags to be defined.

If these are not defined then rviz will throw an error relating the the frame of the finger joints not existing. Further context can be found here.

On initial inspection it looks like the hardware interface that is exposed for ros2_control is only for the arm joints here. For now I am going to assume fake hardware commands for the hand, please feel free to correct this if I have overlooked something.

[BarisYazici]

Hey @peterdavidfagan, everything looks really good! Thanks a lot for investing your time to make it work! We had our planning meeting yesterday, our priorities will be:

1. Write tests for the existing functionality.
2. Verify Humble port #10 on FR3 and merge
3. Implement ReadBlockOnce function in libfranka and integrate it to this repo
4. And then we will merge Port Franka Description Changes from ROS 1 #19 PR.

This plan is for the next 3 weeks. In the meantime, we would appreciate if someone from other teams at Franka or from contributors to give your PR a review. If we find time, we will for sure give you some feedback.

[peterdavidfagan]

Thanks @BarisYazici, looking forward to the above items being merged to the main repository.