An introduction to OpenPHRI

An overview of the OpenPHRI library

What is OpenPHRI?

OpenPHRI is a free and open source C++/Python library designed to ease robot programming when developing physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) and collaboration (pHRC) applications.

The controller allows the user to specify force and/or velocity inputs in both the joint and task spaces to describe the task to acheive. In addition to that, multiple safety constraints can be applied so that the robot stays safe to operate with in any scenario.

Why does OpenPHRI exist?

OpenPHRI tries to answer to the lack a of a generic and open-source framework for pHRI/pHRC. While the library already provides a lot of elements to build your next collaborative robotic application, its open source nature allows users to contribute to its development making the creation of new applications even faster over time.

How do I get OpenPHRI?

The library is package using the PID framework so that its deployment and use is simplified. You can find out more about PID on the official documentation here.

But if you don't like to read documentations too much, here are the steps to get you started. First, install the (very few) system dependencies required to use PID and OpenPHRI.

On Ubuntu:

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install build-essential gfortran git git-lfs cmak

On Archlinux:

sudo pacman -S gcc gcc-fortran git git-lfs cmake

Once you're ready, run the following steps:

git clone https://github.com/lirmm/pid-workspace.git
cd pid-workspace/pid
cmake ..
make deploy package=open-phri

That's it! OpenPHRI as well as its dependencies will be deployed inside the PID workspace (everything is local to a workspace with PID so no more system dependencies from now on).

Now you may want to run the examples provided with the library. If so, enable their compilation and rebuild the library:

cd pid-workspace/packages/open-phri/build
cmake -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON .. # alternatively you can run ccmake to turn the option on
make build

The library as well as the example applications, if you built them, are installed underpid-workspace/install/<your-architecture>/open-phri/<current-version>

In this folder you will find the following directories:

• bin: all the applications

• include: include files for the library

• lib: the compiled version of the library (both debug and release versions)

• share: some PID specific files as well as OpenPHRI runtime resources files

Getting started

Now that OpenPHRI is deployed and ready to use, you can jump to the next page to learn how to write your first application.