# Franka This page gives information about usage of the Franka Research 3. ## Physical robot The physical robot can be started programmatically or manually. ### Quick start (manual) The following steps describe how to start the robot manually: - Start the robot (flip the button at the control box) - Connect your laptop with the control box's LAN port using an ethernet cable. - Make sure to use these ethernet settings: Address: `172.16.0.1`\ Netmask: `255.255.255.0`  You may also want to consider making this a separate profile for future convenience. - Go to [https://172.16.0.2](https://172.16.0.2), Franka Desk should now be reachable. - Login and click *unlock* to unlock the joints. - Click *My Franka Robot > Activate FCI* to activate FCI, the led's should become green. - Launch the franka launch file with *simulation=False*: ```bash ros2 launch rcdt_franka franka.launch.py simulation:=False ``` This should launch Rviz and show the state of the robot. You can control the robot using a connected gamepad or using the *MotionPlanning* plugin in Rviz. ### Quick start (programmatic) You can also unlock and activate the FCI entirely from the command line by dropping a `.env` file in your workspace root: ```dotenv # .env FRANKA_HOSTNAME=your-hostname FRANKA_USERNAME=your-username FRANKA_PASSWORD=your-password ```` This functionallity is based on [jk-ethz/franka\_lock\_unlock](https://github.com/jk-ethz/franka_lock_unlock). With our fork with robot-specific enhancements: [https://github.com/alliander-opensource/franka\_lock\_unlock.git](https://github.com/alliander-opensource/franka_lock_unlock.git) Now when you run: ```bash ros2 launch rcdt_franka franka.launch.py simulation:=False ``` the robot will automatically unlock and activate the FCI. ## Simulation You can also start a simulation, without requiring a real Franka arm. Use the same launch file, but this time without the *simulation* flag: ```bash ros2 launch rcdt_franka franka.launch.py ```