The Gen3 is Kinova’s flagship research and collaborative arm — seven revolute joints give it one redundant degree of freedom beyond the six a manipulator strictly needs, the same trait that makes Franka’s Panda/FR3 popular for manipulation research: an extra axis to reconfigure around obstacles without repositioning the end effector. Every joint is back-drivable and torque-sensing, letting the arm register contact forces directly rather than only through vision or external sensors.
The mechanism
Base, shoulder, two half-arm links, forearm, and two spherical-wrist links form a textbook 7-axis serial chain — no mimic joints, no closed loops, every movable joint an independent actuator, matching Kinova’s own “Gen3 7 DoF” naming exactly.
About these files — read before importing
This is not a URDF. Kinova publishes Gen3 as a parameterized .xacro template shared
across its whole KORTEX product line (6-DOF and 7-DOF Gen3, Gen3 lite) — model identity
comes from the dof argument, not a separate file per configuration. This gallery
entry links directly to the official
ros2_kortex repository’s
kortex_description package, configured for the 7-DOF arm with no vision module and no
gripper, unmodified. ARMOR expands the macros itself after downloading, so
Open in ARMOR gives you a working robot — nothing here is a pre-baked derivative of
Kinova’s files.