Franka Panda

Launched in 2017 at $10,500 (€9,900) per Quartz's contemporary coverage — pitched explicitly against competing research arms that "start around $30,000." At least one later source describes list pricing rising to roughly $17,000 by 2018 as the lineup matured; both figures are shown here rather than treated as a single confirmed number. The Panda has since been withdrawn from sale entirely — Franka Robotics' current lineup sells only the successor Franka Research 3 (around $29,000–$30,000 through distributors such as Clearpath Robotics), and any Panda unit available today is secondhand, remaining distributor inventory, or an existing lab installation. robotindex does not sell this product.

This catalog's Open Source badge covers only the software layer here: libfranka (the C++ real-time control library) and franka_ros / franka_ros2 (the official ROS/ROS2 integration, with MoveIt2 support) are genuinely Apache-2.0-licensed and maintained on GitHub under the frankarobotics organization. But the arm's own hardware — its joint actuators, control-box electronics, and mechanical design — has no published CAD, schematics, or open firmware. That makes the Panda, like several other assembled arms in this catalog, a closed hardware product with an open software stack layered on top; it does not carry this catalog's Open Source badge. Franka Emika filed for insolvency on September 1, 2023, citing irreconcilable shareholder disagreements after investor talks stalled; the company was subsequently acquired by Agile Robots AG and reorganized as Franka Robotics. Franka Robotics has formally withdrawn the Panda from its product line and ended its software support, positioning the visually and mechanically similar Franka Research 3 as the direct successor — current Franka documentation explicitly notes that instructions written for the Panda "do not apply directly" to a current FR3, despite the strong family resemblance. Because of its low relative price and torque-sensing hardware, the Panda became something close to a default platform in manipulation research through the late 2010s and early 2020s — a large installed base remains in active use in university and industrial labs even though new units are no longer sold.