SO-101
← All ProjectsThe SO-101 arm is an open source 5-DOF robotic arm designed to teach imitation learning. I built this arm to dip my toes into robotics and embodied AI.
Inspiration
Over the summer of 2026, I interned at a robotics company working with embodied AI. Prior to working there I had never heard of embodied AI, or more specifically imitation learning. After expressing curiosity about these systems, one of the engineers pointed me towards LeRobot. I decided to build the arm to teach myself the LeRobot pipeline.
Assembly and Operation
After 3D printing the parts and ordering the servos, building the arm was easy. I was able to teleoperate the same day my parts came. I collected 50 episodes of a simple pick and place task and trained the ACT policy on my dataset.
Next Steps
This project was my first step into robotics. At the time of writing this I continue to be curious about embodied AI, and intend to explore that with a custom humanoid project. I’ll next be creating the navigation base for this robot to learn locomotion, and will then mount these arms onto a torso. I expect to be heavily challenged by the software aspect of this project, and I look forward to it.