Hardware

Franka FR3

The Franka FR3, made by Franka Robotics, is the successor to the Franka Emika Panda: a 7-degree-of-freedom torque-controlled research arm with joint torque sensing, a 3 kg payload, and the same 1 kHz low-level control interface, updated for industrial certification and improved reliability. It preserves software compatibility with the libfranka ecosystem, allowing the large body of Panda-based research code and learning pipelines to carry over.

Why it matters for physical AI

Continuity of a dominant research platform matters for data reuse; FR3 arms feature prominently in recent large-scale manipulation data collection efforts and keep the torque-controlled 7-DoF arm a lingua franca of policy learning.