Abstract
Robotic research platforms usually come with oneor more programming interfaces through which researchers can carry out their research work. With the availability of more than one research interface identification of an interface suitable for conducting the research work becomes crucial. Prior knowledge
of interface capabilities can ease not only the selection process of the right programming interface but can also save the effort of porting research work from one programming interface to another during the research work at a later stage. It is important because safety in physical human-robot collaboration is of paramount significance which would need integration of various sensors. Thus, this paper compares the possibility of integrating third party toolbox and sensors with the Franka Emika Panda robot arm through its dedicated research interface, the Franka Control Interface. Matlab-Simulink based on Franka Matlab interface though user-friendly compared to C++ programming interface (based on libfranka) has been found to lack support for integration of third-party toolbox. This also limits the exchange of information through various available protocols. It has also been found that this issue exists also because Matlab-Simulink support packages for Windows are well established compared to those available for Linux.