The Franka Research 3 is Franka Robotics’ current 7-axis collaborative arm for research, succeeding the Panda with updated joint limits, torque sensing, and control electronics while keeping the same fundamental mechanism and the same distinctive silhouette.
The mechanism
Seven revolute joints in series give the arm seven degrees of freedom — one more than
the six a manipulator strictly needs to reach an arbitrary pose, which is what lets it
thread itself around obstacles a 6-axis arm would have to reconfigure for. The optional
Franka Hand adds a two-finger parallel gripper at the flange. The two finger joints in
the URDF are not independently actuated: the second one carries a mimic constraint on the
first, matching the real hardware’s single gripper motor driving both fingers symmetrically.
About these files — read before importing
These files are not a URDF. franka_ros publishes FR3 as .urdf.xacro: a template that
builds the robot through macro expansion rather than literal XML, and ARMOR’s importer does
not process xacro yet. This gallery entry links directly to the official
franka_ros xacro tree — unmodified, exactly
as Franka Robotics publishes it — ahead of that support landing in the app, so there is a
real fixture ready to test against the moment it does. Until then, tapping Open in
ARMOR will tell you the app needs an update, rather than attempting (and failing at) an
import it cannot yet do.
Each variant bundles the top-level xacro file together with every xacro and YAML file it includes and every mesh those includes reference, so importing it — once ARMOR can — pulls in one complete, self-contained set of files rather than an incomplete one.