Hardware

KUKA iiwa

The KUKA LBR iiwa is a seven-DOF collaborative robot arm with joint torque sensors in every axis, offered in 7 kg and 14 kg payload variants. Its integrated torque sensing supports impedance control, hand-guiding, and sensitive collision detection, and it became a fixture of research labs, notably as the platform for the Amazon Picking Challenge entries and Google's early large-scale grasping experiments.

Why it matters for physical AI

Torque-sensing arms like the iiwa proved that whole-arm compliance and collision sensitivity could be industrial-grade, setting the hardware template for safe physical interaction that learned contact-rich skills now build on.