Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk

[mplappert]

Quick framing, since the post is long: I did robotic manipulation research at OpenAI from 2017–2020, and the tabletop setup back then cost roughly 10x this one and took a team to run. This project is me testing whether a single person can now do meaningful work on the same class of problems: starting with physical and software setup.

A few decisions I'm least settled on, and would love some pushback/feedback on:

- single arm vs. bimanual (I went single for cost/space, knowing it rules out things like folding cloth)

- not calibrating camera extrinsics/intrinsics for now

- RGB vs. RGB-D for from-scratch policies (ACT / Diffusion Policy)

And one I'm more confident about but expect disagreement on: not building on ROS 2 / LeRobot, and writing my own stack instead. Happy to get into the reasoning.