Franka Emika Panda / Franka Research 3

A German-made 7-DoF force-controlled robot arm, one of the most common single arms in robotics research.

The Franka arm was developed by Franka Emika of Munich, Germany; the early model was called Panda, and its research successor is the Franka Research 3 (FR3). It has 7 degrees of freedom, one more than the 6 needed to set an end effector's position and orientation, giving it extra flexibility, and all 7 joints carry torque sensors, enabling compliant force control. It has a 3 kg payload, an 855 mm reach, repeatability of ±0.1 mm, and can be controlled in real time at 1 kHz through its FCI interface. After the company filed for bankruptcy in 2023, it was acquired by Agile Robots and renamed Franka Robotics. Thanks to its strong force control and open interfaces, it has been used to collect large numbers of robot-learning datasets, including DROID and Open X-Embodiment.

ExampleThe DROID dataset was collected using Franka Panda arms across hundreds of real-world scenes.

Also called

Franka, Franka Panda, Panda, FR3, Franka Research 3

Related

7-DoF Robot Arm · Joint Torque Sensor · libfranka / Franka Control Interface (FCI) · DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset) · Collaborative Robot · Agile Robots

Sources

Franka Research 3 (franka.de)
Agile Robots acquires Franka Emika - The Robot Report

As of

2025-03