Does OpenVLA run on Franka Emika Panda?

Capabilities

Caveats

• Panda results come from fine-tuning (10-150 demonstrations per task), not out-of-the-box use. The OpenVLA repo ships no Franka controller or deployment script.
• OpenVLA takes a single image and predicts single-step actions. The Franka setups ran 5 Hz (Franka-Tabletop) and 15 Hz (Franka-DROID) non-blocking controllers.

Evidence 2 sources; the cell shows the highest tier

1. T1 · upstream documentedpapersource 2024-09-05verified 2026-10-24 (1d ago)

   OpenVLA paper, Sec. 5.2: OpenVLA is fully fine-tuned and evaluated on a table-mounted Franka Emika Panda (Franka-Tabletop) and on the DROID Franka setup.

   “We test OpenVLA in two setups: Franka-Tabletop, a stationary, table-mounted Franka Emika Panda 7-DoF robot arm; and Franka-DROID, the Franka robot arm setup from the recently released DROID dataset [11],”

   https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09246v3
2. T1 · upstream documentedpapersource 2024-09-05verified 2026-10-24 (1d ago)

   OpenVLA paper, Appendix B.3: six Franka-Tabletop (Panda) tasks and one Franka-DROID task, 129 rollouts per approach.

   “We collect 10–150 demonstrations of each of seven tasks. The first six tasks correspond to a robot setup which we denote as “Franka-Tabletop” (Franka Emika Panda robot mounted on top of a table),”

   https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09246v3