Hardware

xArm (UFACTORY xArm)

The xArm is a family of low-cost collaborative manipulators from UFACTORY, offered in 5-, 6-, and 7-DOF variants with payloads of roughly 3 to 6 kg, integrated harmonic-drive joints, and Python, ROS, and Modbus interfaces. Its price point, an order of magnitude below traditional cobots at launch, made it a common platform in manipulation research labs and appears in several open imitation-learning and teleoperation stacks.

Why it matters for physical AI

Cheap, ROS-friendly arms determine who can do embodied AI research; platforms like the xArm broadened participation and supplied heterogeneous embodiments to cross-robot datasets used for training generalist policies.