Hardware

Franka Emika Panda

The Franka Emika Panda is a 7-degree-of-freedom torque-controlled collaborative robot arm released in 2017, featuring joint torque sensors in every axis, a 3 kg payload, and a 1 kHz real-time control interface (libfranka and the Franka Control Interface). Its combination of compliant torque control, research-friendly software, and relatively low cost made it the de facto standard arm in manipulation research, appearing in countless learning papers and benchmarks.

Why it matters for physical AI

Shared hardware platforms make robot learning results comparable and reproducible across labs; the Panda's ubiquity shaped the datasets, simulators, and action spaces much of today's manipulation research builds on.