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Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk
Read the full article on dfdxlabs.com ↗80
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The 5-second version
- A complete robotics research setup with industrial arm, cameras, and teleoperation can now be built for under €5,000, roughly 10x cheaper than equivalent setups from 5 years ago.
- The author is conducting independent open research on robotic manipulation, prioritizing research logs over papers or open-source code to document what works and fails.
- The physical setup uses a UFACTORY xArm Lite 6, Intel RealSense D405 wrist camera, Logitech C920 table camera, and 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse for teleoperation, all fitting next to a desk.
- Key design constraints were: under €10,000, desk-sized, readily available parts, Python-controllable, and unopinionated software stack to enable custom research.
- The author deliberately accepts messy, variable real-world conditions (changing backgrounds, lighting, camera positions) as a feature to study robust generalization rather than lab-perfect data.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
I'm very interested in the SO101. I've never done any robotics and that seems a palatable entry level thing to try things out. How have you found it? (The author does explain his reasons for not using LeRobot in the post - although "I also use LeRobot for training and running baseline policies, and the vendor SDKs for the hardware.")Read on HN ↗
NalNezumi3.5k karma
Cool stuff. At my previous (startup / research) job I had to set up similar system (but with franka arm and multi view camera) alone because I was the only one with robotics background. >I do not intend to calibrate the camera’s extrinsics or intrinsics for now. Sensible choice, although I suggest it's good in the long run to do at early stage in your setup, especially if you intend to collect data for policy learning. Debugging trained policies for visual manipulation task can be a headache…Read on HN ↗
whiplash4511.9k karma
How does Lerobot prevent « full control » and « understanding »? I thought this was an open source library. I am not an official supporter of the library but am asking out of curiosity.Read on HN ↗