Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with multipanda_ros2: A Real-Time ROS2 Framework for Multimanual Systems

Abstract:We present $multipanda\_ros2$, a novel open-source ROS2 architecture for multi-robot control of Franka Robotics robots. Leveraging ros2 control, this framework provides native ROS2 interfaces for controlling any number of robots from a single process. Our core contributions address key challenges in real-time torque control, including interaction control and robot-environment modeling. A central focus of this work is sustaining a 1kHz control frequency, a necessity for real-time control and a minimum frequency required by safety standards. Moreover, we introduce a controllet-feature design pattern that enables controller-switching delays of $\le 2$ ms, facilitating reproducible benchmarking and complex multi-robot interaction scenarios. To bridge the simulation-to-reality (sim2real) gap, we integrate a high-fidelity MuJoCo simulation with quantitative metrics for both kinematic accuracy and dynamic consistency (torques, forces, and control errors). Furthermore, we demonstrate that real-world inertial parameter identification can significantly improve force and torque accuracy, providing a methodology for iterative physics refinement. Our work extends approaches from soft robotics to rigid dual-arm, contact-rich tasks, showcasing a promising method to reduce the sim2real gap and providing a robust, reproducible platform for advanced robotics research.

Published at IEEE ICRA 2026. Source code available at this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

I.2.9; C.3; D.2.11; I.6.4

arXiv:2602.02269 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2602.02269v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.02269 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 9679-9686

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA57385.2026.11696149 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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