This package was built for ROS melodic running under Ubuntu 18.04. Run the following command to make sure that all additional packages are installed:
sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-moveit-ros-move-group ros-melodic-controller-manager* ros-melodic-moveit* ros-melodic-effort-controllers ros-melodic-joint-trajectory-controller ros-melodic-gazebo-ros* ros-melodic-rviz* libboost-filesystem-dev libjsoncpp-dev
It is also important that you build the libfranka library from source and pass its directory to catkin_make when building this ROS package as described in this tutorial.
Currently it includes a controller parameter config file and a launch file to launch the Gazebo simulation environment and the Panda robot from FRANKA EMIKA in it with the necessary controllers.
Build the catkin workspace and run the simulation:
catkin_make -j4 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DFranka_DIR:PATH=~/path/to/libfranka/build
source devel/setup.bash
roslaunch panda_simulation simulation.launch
Depending on your operating systems language you might need to export the numeric type so that rviz can read the floating point numbers in the robot model correctly:
export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
Otherwise, the robot will appear in rviz in a collapsed state.
You can see the full explanation in my blog post.
This repository was extended with a MoveIt! planning where the motion planning pipeline avoids collision objects in the environment specified by the user in a separate directory (~/.panda_simulation) as JSON files. You can read more about it in the accompanying blog post.