[adolph]

You have to think of this as an entire system. The arm is necessary but not sufficient. An "arm" could be as simple as small servos and popsicle sticks [0]. In the case of ALOHA, below is an outline of the basic components.

  * arms (aka follower arms)
    - effector (i.e. gripper)
    - sensors (i.e. cameras, depth sensors, specced Intel RealSense D405)
    - gravity compensation (so the relatively delicate servos aren't overloaded)

  * controller
    - runs Robot Operating System (ROS [1]) plus other software (i.e. arm, gripper interfaces [2])
    - runs ALOHA model in inference to tell ROS what to do based on task and sensor input
    - trains ALOHA models using arm motion encoder and ACT: Action Chunking with Transformers [4]
  
  * leader arms
    - motion encoders (essentialy an arm in reverse that can be used by a human to telecontrol the arm to encode motions into model training)

The system at this point is "research grade" which is at once expensive due to custom/nice materials/units and not super user friendly--you must know a lot. See the build instructions [5].

0. https://github.com/evildmp/BrachioGraph

1. https://www.ros.org/

2. https://github.com/interbotix

3. https://www.trossenrobotics.com/aloha-kits

4. https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/act

5. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sgRZmpS7HMcZTPfGy3kAxDrq...