Keeping the Franka Emika Panda alive: a ROS 2 stack with a reliable position interface

This paper presents an open-source software stack that restores ROS 2 support for the Franka Emika Panda robot while resolving the long-standing unreliability of its external position control interface. We first analyze the root causes of unstable position control and show that the observed vibrations and protective stops arise from the timing of the external control loop and sampling jitter, rather than from limitations of the robot itself. Building on this analysis, we introduce an asynchronous hardware interface that decouples real-time communication from the ROS 2 control loop, a rate-matching mechanism for slower command sources, and a position-domain reference generation strategy that produces reliable, smooth position commands. Experimental validation shows that the proposed architecture reliably tracks velocity references by reducing motion artifacts introduced by the official implementation, and the stack is validated across motion planning, compliance control, position-controlled manipulation, and haptic teleoperation on two independent Panda platforms. By restoring a modern, reliable, and open ROS 2 ecosystem for the Panda, this work lowers the barrier to developing safe, responsive, and reproducible human-robot collaboration applications that integrate planning, perception, interaction, and shared autonomy. Code and videos are available on our website at https://sites.google.com/view/fer-ros2/.

Simplifying ROS2 controllers with a modular architecture for robot-agnostic reference generation

This paper introduces a novel modular architecture for ROS2 that decouples the logic required to acquire, validate, and interpolate references from the control laws that track them. The design includes a dedicated component, named Reference Generator, that receives references, in the form of either single points or trajectories, from external nodes (e.g., planners), and writes single-point references at the controller's sampling period via the existing ros2_control chaining mechanism to downstream controllers. This separation removes duplicated reference-handling code from controllers and improves reusability across robot platforms. We implement two reference generators: one for handling joint-space references and one for Cartesian references, along with a set of new controllers (PD with gravity compensation, Cartesian pose, and admittance controllers) and validate the approach on simulated and real Universal Robots and Franka Emika manipulators. Results show that (i) references are tracked reliably in all tested scenarios, (ii) reference generators reduce duplicated reference-handling code across chained controllers to favor the construction and reuse of complex controller pipelines, and (iii) controller implementations remain focused only on control laws.