Franka Robotics

A Munich force-controlled robot-arm maker whose Panda / FR3 arms are among the most common in robotics research.

Franka's predecessor, Franka Emika, was founded in Munich, Germany, in 2016 by Sami Haddadin and others; Haddadin had previously done robotics research at the German Aerospace Center, and the team won Germany's Future Prize in 2017 for the 7-axis force-controlled collaborative arm Panda. Panda and its research-oriented successor, FR3, have a torque sensor at every joint and expose a 1 kHz real-time control interface, making them the most common robot arm seen in robot-learning papers and datasets such as DROID. The company filed for insolvency in August 2023 after a shareholder dispute and was acquired by Agile Robots that November, taking the name Franka Robotics. It has since moved toward embodied AI: in 2025 it launched the dual-arm prototype FR3 Duo, and in January 2026 at CES it used that prototype for the first public on-device, end-to-end demo of NVIDIA's GR00T N1.6, while also offering a robot-data-collection service.

ExampleThe DROID dataset was collected by 13 institutions using the same setup — a Franka Panda plus cameras — so a policy trained on DROID is often tested directly on a real Franka arm.

Also called

Franka Emika

Related

Franka Emika Panda / Franka Research 3 · Agile Robots · Franka Hand · libfranka / Franka Control Interface (FCI) · DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset) · NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1

Sources

Franka @ CES 2026: Powering the Future of Embodied AI
Agile Robots acquires Franka Emika (Munich Startup, 2023-11)
Deutscher Zukunftspreis 2017, Team 2 (Franka Emika)

As of

2026-01