The Panda is Franka Robotics’ original 7-axis collaborative arm — the robot most research labs and university courses meant when they said “the Franka” for the better part of a decade. Instantly recognisable by its white finish and the concentric bands on each joint housing, it was built to be safe to work next to and precise enough to matter for manipulation research, and it became something close to a de facto standard for that.
The Panda (formally the Franka Emika Robot, FER) is end-of-life, succeeded by the Franka Research 3 for research use and the Franka Production 3 for industrial deployment. It is included here for the substantial body of published research, courseware, and existing hardware that is still built around it.
The mechanism
Seven revolute joints in series give the arm a full 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 the Panda 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.