Building a robotics research setup that lives next to a desk

Article excerpt

Matthias Plappert at dfdx labs will spend the next several months doing independent research on robotic manipulation, and doing it in the open. I don’t expect the main output to be papers or an open-source codebase. What I care about here is the research log itself: what works, what fails, and what I learn from running the system. This note covers step one: building the full foundation for doing research. The first half is about the physical setup: an industrial-grade robot arm, two cameras, and teleoperation in a package small enough to live next to my desk. The second half is about the software stack I wrote from scratch to operate it. The video (below) shows the result in action. A robot stack written in Python, running on a consumer laptop, is clearly only ever going to be a soft re