UW Open-Sources FrankaTwin: System ID Aligns Simulated Franka Arm to Real One Within 3.6mm
abhishekunique7 · x · 2026-09-23
Tao Sun's lab at UW released FrankaTwin, an open-source sim-to-real alignment stack for the Franka Research 3 / Panda arms. The same 1kHz task-space impedance law (identical gains and damping) runs on the real robot via libfranka in C++ and in IsaacLab, covering joint/Cartesian position and impedance control plus the gripper.
The core is a reliable system-identification pipeline for Isaac Sim that fits the arm's joint dynamics from real excitation runs. On a held-out chirp at unseen gains, the identified sim tracks the real arm to 3.6mm end-effector position RMSE and 28mrad joint RMSE — 5.4x and 16.5x better than PhysX defaults.
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