End Effector

The tool mounted at the very tip of a robot arm that actually touches and works on objects.

An end effector is the tool mounted on the last link of a robot arm's kinematic chain, attached through a tool flange — it's what actually makes contact with the environment: grippers, dexterous hands, vacuum suction cups, welding torches, and screwdrivers all count. The arm's job is to bring the end effector to a target position and orientation; the end effector's job is to carry out the specific action — grasping, suctioning, screwing, and so on. In embodied-AI papers, “EEF” often also refers to the end effector's position and orientation: many policies directly output an end-effector pose (an action in task space), which is then converted to joint angles through inverse kinematics, while other policies output joint angles directly. Swap in a different end effector, and both the action space and the tasks the robot can perform change with it.

ExampleThe end effector most often paired with a Franka arm is Franka's own Franka Hand, a two-finger parallel gripper.

Also called

EE, End-of-Arm Tool

Related

Gripper · Dexterous Hand · End-Effector Pose · Tool Center Point · Tool Flange · Inverse Kinematics (IK)

Sources

Robot end effector - Wikipedia
Franka Hand（Franka Robotics 官网） (Chinese)