November 04, 2025
Boulder, CO - November 4, 2025 — PickNik Robotics, today announced expanded support for the Franka Research 3 (FR3) robot arm in its flagship software platform, MoveIt Pro, enabling researchers to accelerate AI robotics development through high-fidelity simulation, training data collection, and hardware-ready policy deployment.
PickNik and Franka Robotics have partnered since 2018 to provide leading tools for robotic manipulation. Franka’s robot arms are widely adopted in research institutions around the world and are recognized for their sensitivity, precision, and reliability. The latest collaboration highlights their shared commitment to advancing AI for robotics manipulation.
The new MoveIt Pro integration for FR3 includes:
- Complete robot models (URDF/SRDF) for single- and dual-arm setups.
- High-fidelity digital twin environments to collect training data and test policies.
- Tutorials for collecting datasets and training diffusion policies.
- A detailed hardware setup guide to move seamlessly from simulation to real systems.
“AI research in robotics depends on safe, reliable ways to collect data and validate algorithms,” said Dave Coleman, PhD, Founder and Chief Product Officer at PickNik Robotics. “With MoveIt Pro and Franka Research 3, teams can focus on innovation instead of integration.”
This collaboration addresses one of the central bottlenecks in AI robotics: the gap between research and deployment. By combining FR3’s hardware capabilities with MoveIt Pro’s advanced planning and simulation tools, researchers and decision-makers can more effectively advance manipulation AI while reducing cost and risk.
👉 Learn more at https://picknik.ai/pro.
Media Contact:
Clara Bahan
clara.bahan@picknik.ai
PickNik Robotics helps companies bring their robotics vision to life—from ideation through to production. As experts in unstructured robotics, PickNik enables organizations to develop, validate, and deploy advanced robotic so lutions more quickly and with less risk. The team’s mission is to make robotic automation accessible and impactful for every industry.
MoveIt Pro is PickNik Robotics’ commercial robotics software platform that extends the capabilities of the open-source MoveIt project. Designed for unstructured environments, MoveIt Pro provides powerful tools for motion planning, grasping, perception, and behavior sequencing. With pre-built robot behaviors and a modular runtime architecture, MoveIt Pro significantly reduces engineering effort and time-to-deployment. Its hardware-agnostic design supports a wide range of commercial and custom robotic arms, making it ideal for scalable automation across space, manufacturing, and logistics sectors.
