The Franka Emika Robot: A Reference Platform for Robotics Research and Education

The importance of robots for industry, research, education, and society as a whole is steadily increasing as reflected by the number of available systems and installed robots, not only in industry but also in the public sector and households. Software-only robotics researchers usually rely on commercially available robots which, in the case of manipulators, are primarily designed for industrial purposes and are often far from their needs. This article is a hands-on tutorial on the Franka Emika robot, the first series of industrial artificial intelligence (AI)-ready tactile robot platforms. Beyond industrial use, the systems can be seamlessly expanded to fulfill the demands of research and education across all robotics and AI disciplines. To satisfy the needs of such a wide variety of fields, it provides three different interfaces: Desk, a high-level app-based user interface for easy and fast task programming; Robot Integrated Development Environment (RIDE), a command-based programming environment used to create high-performance robot skills that enables programming custom apps and integrating external sensors; and the Franka control interface (FCI), a 1-kHz low-level torque and position control interface that exploits the also-Available Langrangian dynamics robot model. We take a close look at implementations with all interfaces, ranging from simple solutions, apps, and controllers to robot-learning examples illustrating how to exploit all the advantages of this platform in ongoing robotics research and education.