Mobile ALOHA: a 2-armed robot created by Stanford students for "only $32,000" that can be taught to do household chores
The inventors have fully opened access to their development and created instructions on how to create such a robot yourself
Students at Stanford University have developed Mobile ALOHA, a robot mounted on a moving platform and equipped with home-made robotic arms and a low-profile logistics robot that acts as a chassis, from scrap and sticks available on the free market. To train the robot, its creators performed a specific task 50 times (such as frying shrimp, opening a cupboard for kitchen utensils, calling and entering a lift, and lightly rinsing a frying pan), after which the robot was able to perform the operations autonomously.
Mobile ALOHA prepares a three-course meal
The cost of Mobile ALOHA is about $32,000. A significant part of the amount is the ViperX 300 Robot Arm 6DOF ($6,130) and WidowX 250 Robot Arm 6DOF ($3,550) manipulators from Trossen Robotics. And the Tracer AGV mobile robot ($7,000) from the same manufacturer. It seems that the authors of the invention have already written their names in history: Zipeng Fu, Tony Z. Zhao and Chelsea Finn.
Mobile ALOHA does the housework
The developers have made all the project materials publicly available, including instructions for building a similar robot, a dataset, hardware code, and codes for training the robot. The gg editorial team is delighted with the project and hopes that it will, if not open a new era of home robots, then encourage other inventors to create similar developments. Who knows - maybe in a few years, other open-source projects will appear that will allow enthusiasts to create home assistants.
Here are some examples of Mobile ALOHA's work, videos of which can be found on the inventors' website:
Source: mobile-aloha.github.io
