OpenManipulator-X
About
About OpenManipulator-X
OpenManipulator-X is a small serial arm assembled from networked DYNAMIXEL actuators, modular structural links and an electrically driven gripper. Each actuator reports position and operating data over a shared bus, allowing the controller to coordinate joint motion and monitor the mechanism. The arm can be operated from an embedded controller, a computer running ROS or ROBOTIS development software.
Its open mechanical files and software interfaces support kinematics teaching, motion planning, teleoperation and manipulation experiments. The same hardware can be mounted on a bench or combined with TurtleBot3 to create a mobile-manipulation platform. ROBOTIS sells OpenManipulator-X as a kit with documentation, example packages and replacement components for universities, training programmes and robotics developers.
Capabilities
Source-backed capabilities
- Capability areas: Robotic manipulation
- Workflows: Robot manipulation research
- Operating environments: Research lab
- Object manipulation
Research demonstration - 2025-12-29 - ROBOTIS OpenManipulator-X performed obstacle-aware manipulation using explainable neural inverse kinematics.
Source
Research
- NeuralActuator: Neural Actuation Modeling for Robot Dynamics and External Force Perception
2026-07-13 - Research Publication - The authors present NeuralActuator, which jointly predicts (i) a torque surrogate for trajectory propagation on low-cost servo platforms, (ii) external forces with a contact-probability gate for sensorless force perception, and (iii) a motor-condition score for a supervised joint, distinguishing normal from mechanically restricted operation.
Source - Explainable Neural Inverse Kinematics for Obstacle-Aware Robotic Manipulation: A Comparative Analysis of IKNet Variants
2025-12-29 - Research Publication - The study applies explainable neural inverse kinematics to obstacle-aware manipulation on the ROBOTIS OpenManipulator-X.
Source - Constrained Nonlinear Kaczmarz Projection on Intersections of Manifolds for Coordinated Multi-Robot Mobile Manipulation
2024-10-29 - Research Publication - The authors propose a two-part method whose first component models constraints as a family of manifolds that can be solved simultaneously.
Source - OpenManipulator-X dynamics-control paper compares PD gravity compensation strategies
2022-03-02 - Research Publication - This paper covers OpenManipulator-X dynamics-control paper compares PD gravity compensation strategies for OpenManipulator-X in Robot learning.
Source
Timeline
- ROBOTIS introduces OpenMANIPULATOR at ROSCon 2017
2017-09-21 - Product Launch - ROBOTIS introduced OpenMANIPULATOR at ROSCon 2017 on September 21, 2017. ROBOTIS presented OpenMANIPULATOR as a full open robot platform. The milestone connected OpenMANIPULATOR-X to the ROS developer ecosystem.
Source
Context
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