Nori A3
Hardware setup pages on this site still cover the Nori L2
Full A3 docs are coming soon — until they land, get in touch for anything physical. Everything else here applies to the A3 unchanged.
What the A3 is
A 19-DoF bimanual mobile manipulator, the design successor to the L2. It ships assembled and has been shipping to customers since July 2026.
| Arms | 2× 7+1 DoF, 55 cm reach, 1.5 kg payload each |
| End effectors | Grippers with compliant TPU fingers, mounted on an open connector joint — design your own against it |
| Lift | Three-stage telescoping column; 69–145 cm overall height (floor-to-counter reach) at 30 mm/s, ~25 s end to end |
| Base | Differential drive with passive casters — lateral repositioning is a maneuver, not a strafe; 45 × 45 cm footprint |
| Weight | 20.4 kg — one person can carry it between rooms |
| Actuators | Feetech STS-series servos in three torque grades (95, 50, 30 kg·cm), matched to each joint's load |
| Compute | Raspberry Pi 5, 4 GB — bus I/O, control loop, and the protection layers below. Inference runs off-board |
| Cameras | 4× 720p RGB, up to 30 fps — left_wrist and right_wrist on the grippers, overhead and front on the head and neck. The same four roles as the L2 |
| Lidar | 12 m range, 8–12 Hz scan rate, 0.72° angular resolution at 10 Hz |
| Audio | Speaker and microphone, for spoken commands |
| Battery | 24 V, 18 Ah — 6–8 hours of operation |
The arms are position-controlled; compliance is local to the contact point, supplied by the TPU fingers.
Actuator protection
The servos are protected in layers, all on-board the robot: goal positions are clamped to the calibrated range at the bus layer, a stall detector cuts torque on a joint pressed into an obstruction, and a two-tier thermal interlock — a software supervisor backed by an independent per-motor hardware cutoff — handles over-temperature. The grippers also report a continuous grip-force estimate recovered from their own current sensing; there is no dedicated force sensor.
You'll meet these as safety states; the grip-force signal is currents in telemetry.
What already works on an A3
The desktop app, the teleoperation stack, and the SDK are built against a protocol rather than a particular chassis:
| Area | Applies to the A3 |
|---|---|
| The desktop app | Yes — same app, same install |
| Remote teleoperation | Yes — connection, modes, and commands are protocol-level |
| VR | Yes — the VR page is hosted, not installed per-robot |
| Audio and calls | Yes |
| Recording and training | Yes — training is cloud-dispatched, inference is local |
| Safety states | Yes — the safety contract is the same |
The @nori/sdk | Yes — nothing in the SDK is model-specific |
If you are writing code against a robot, start at the SDK overview.
Try it in simulation
You don't need an A3 — or an account — to start building against one. The robot description is published, and there's a live viewer in the browser.
Open the model viewer — orbit it, drag a joint, read the real limits. Nothing to install.
Drive it around an apartment — the same page, in sim mode. WASD drives the base and U/O the lift, on the same key bindings a paired robot answers to, and an inset shows what any of the four robot cameras sees. Kinematic only: the base is collided as a circle against the room, and nothing in it has mass.
Download the description — URDF/xacro, collision primitives, materials, per-link mass, and simplified visual meshes. Loads in Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo, or anything that reads URDF.
What to trust
Read this before building on the model, not after.
| Kinematics | Measured and verified against hardware — joint axes, limits, link transforms |
| Joint limits | Tested on real units |
| Mass | Per-link, weighed — but the total is ~10% light (18.3 kg modelled vs 20.4 kg real) |
| Inertia | Approximate. Each link is a uniform-density primitive |
| Collision | Deliberately primitive — boxes, cylinders, spheres |
| Camera aim | Positions measured; aim angles modelled but not yet verified on hardware |
| Torso, neck, head | Masses measured; shapes are placeholders |
Two specifics that will otherwise look like bugs:
The lift's joint limit is an operating ceiling, not its stroke. The joint is capped at 700 mm, short of the mechanism's full travel, to keep the carriage off the top mechanical stop — and that cap is what the real controllers command, so simulating against 700 mm matches the hardware.
The placeholder torso shape rarely matters. The overhead camera doesn't see the torso in practice, so policies trained on that view are unaffected. The torso is there for human eyes — in RViz, in demos, in the viewer above.
Loading it
Three things trip up most imports:
Isaac Sim — use the URDF importer. Leave Import Inertia Tensor unchecked and let PhysX compute from the collision geometry; the tensors here are uniform-density estimates, not measurements. Set the collider type to convex decomposition.
MuJoCo — convert with the standard URDF path. Check the mimic joints survive (see below); MuJoCo expresses them as equality constraints.
Anything — the model has three mimic joints: the lift's middle stage and both geared grippers. They are the most common import casualty. If the lift's middle section doesn't move at half the top's rate, or a gripper's second finger sits still while the first closes, the mimic didn't survive. Everything else is ordinary revolute and prismatic joints.
License
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — free for research and simulation, share-alike, not for commercial use. Converting it and publishing your conversion is expressly fine. Commercial enquiries: info@norirobotics.com.
Not open source in the OSI sense — the non-commercial term disqualifies it — so please describe it as source available.
Printable parts
Parts of the A3 are meant to be printed by you — spares you can replace yourself, attachment-point geometry for designing custom end effectors, and cosmetic covers to restyle. We publish those as print-ready files:
nori-printables — STL (and STEP where available) with tested print settings and installation notes, organized per model in the a3/ folder.
Unlike the robot description above, these are CC BY 4.0 — genuinely open source. Print them, modify them, sell them; just credit Nori Robotics.
If you need a part that isn't published yet — a spare that broke, or an interface for something you're building — open an issue; if we can release it, we will.
What is L2-specific
Electrical specifications, charging, leader-arm setup and calibration, camera mounting, and power diagnostics all live on one page: Nori L2. Do not follow it on an A3 — where the machines differ, an L2 page gives you confident, wrong steps.
If you have an L2, nothing changes: start here. The L2 documentation stays up and stays maintained after the A3 pages land.
Setting up an A3 today
Setup support is hands-on for now — get in touch. If something is broken on a robot you already have running, Something's broken is the fastest way in.
Dedicated pages are being written, in roughly this order:
- A3 hardware setup — unboxing to first power-on
- A3 power and cabling — electrical specifications, charging, current limits
- A3 calibration — motor IDs and homing
- Moving from L2 to A3 — what changes, for existing L2 owners