Kinova Robotic Manipulators

Kinova™ robotic arms empower their users to reach their goals and innovate faster, being a versatile, modular, and scalable solution to modern problems. Kinova™ products are used in various applications, including teleoperation, human-robot collaboration, simulation, testing, inspection, and vision-based picking. The Kinova Gen3 and Gen3 lite are powered by the Kinova Kortex™ API and available in different configurations: 6 or 7 DoF, with or without the vision module, and Robotiq gripper in option.

Kinova™ is rooted in the augmentation of human capabilities; its robots are designed to be controlled by humans and to adapt to their specific working environment and conditions, not the other way around. Its robotic arm manipulators enable new robotic applications to optimize research capabilities across multiple industries. Researchers from more than 500 universities worldwide rely on Kinova™ solutions for various tasks, from BCI control to humanoid manipulators.

MATLAB^® supports the Kinova™ Gen3, Gen3 lite, and Gen2 Ultra lightweight robots.

For Kinova Gen3 robots, the Robotics System Toolbox Support Package for Manipulators enables connectivity and control of the robot and access to the Kinova vision module depth and color streams in MATLAB via the Image Acquisition Toolbox. The support package provides a MATLAB MEX API and ROS API that uses Ethernet or Wi-Fi to communicate with the robot. For more information, see the support package documentation.

For Kinova Gen 2 robots, a MATLAB wrapper on the Kinova™ SDK enables users to connect to the robots from within MATLAB and query the status of robot components (fingers, arm joints, etc.), including properties such as position and velocity. Users can also send commands to control and move the robots. For more information, see GitHub repository for Gen2 robotic arms.