Guide

Open Source Robot Learning Kits

Affordable, community-backed hardware for imitation learning, data collection, and VLA research—from first demo to trained policy.

The Open-Source Advantage

Open-source robot kits lower the barrier to entry for manipulation research. They provide reproducible hardware designs, community-maintained software stacks, and compatibility with popular learning frameworks like LeRobot, robomimic, and ACT. For labs that need to scale up data collection across many identical setups, open-source kits offer an unbeatable cost-per-arm ratio.

Kits Available at SVRC

OpenArm 101

SVRC's own 6-DOF open-source arm, purpose-built for data collection and imitation learning. OpenArm ships fully assembled and calibrated, with a leader-follower teleoperation setup, ROS 2 drivers, and first-class LeRobot integration. It is the fastest path from unboxing to recording your first demonstration dataset.

View OpenArm 101 specs and pricing →

SO-100 / SO-101

The SO-100 and SO-101 are low-cost 6-DOF arms from the Hugging Face LeRobot community. Built from 3D-printed parts and hobby servos, they cost under $300 in materials. The SO-101 adds improved servo brackets and cable routing. Both are natively supported by the LeRobot Python library for data recording and policy training.

Browse SO-100/SO-101 kits in the store →

ALOHA / Mobile ALOHA

A bimanual teleoperation platform from Stanford using paired ViperX arms. Mobile ALOHA adds a wheeled base for whole-body manipulation tasks. SVRC carries pre-assembled ALOHA setups and supports custom configurations with additional sensors or different arm models.

The LeRobot Ecosystem

LeRobot is an open-source Python framework by Hugging Face for robot learning. It provides a unified interface for:

  • Data recording — Capture demonstrations in a standard format with synchronized camera and joint data.
  • Dataset management — Upload, version, and share datasets on the Hugging Face Hub.
  • Policy training — Train ACT, Diffusion Policy, and other architectures with a single config file.
  • Evaluation — Replay trained policies on real hardware or in simulation.

All SVRC open-source kits ship with LeRobot configuration files so you can start recording within minutes of setup.

Choosing the Right Kit

  • Budget under $300 — SO-100/SO-101 (requires 3D printing and assembly).
  • Ready-to-use out of the box — OpenArm 101 (fully assembled, calibrated, SVRC-supported).
  • Bimanual tasks — ALOHA or DK1 Bimanual Kit for two-arm setups.
  • Mobile manipulation — Mobile ALOHA for navigation + manipulation research.

Next Steps

Visit the SVRC Store to see all kits, or start with the learning paths for step-by-step onboarding. For bulk orders or custom configurations, contact contact@roboticscenter.ai.