Punyo is TRI’s research platform for soft, compliant whole-arm manipulation — instead of a rigid parallel-jaw gripper, each arm ends in an inflatable “bubble” paw whose tactile sensing lets the robot hug, cradle, and push against objects too large or awkward for a conventional pinch grasp, the way a person would use their forearms as much as their fingertips.
The mechanism
Two identical 7-DOF Kinova-derived arms mount to a shared torso, giving 14 independently actuated joints in total. Every movable joint is a real revolute axis — no mimic joints, no closed loops — so the naive joint count already matches the robot’s true degrees of freedom.
About these files — read before importing
This is a real, literal URDF — not a xacro template — published directly in TRI’s own
punyo_egrl repository, the reinforcement-learning research package TRI built around
Punyo on top of NVIDIA’s IsaacGymEnvs. This gallery entry links to that file and its
meshes unmodified, exactly as TRI committed them.