Desktop Robot Arm

A small, inexpensive robot arm that sits directly on a desk, used for teaching and data collection.

A desktop robot arm is small and light enough to sit directly on an office desk, usually with a payload of a few hundred grams to a kilogram or two, priced far below industrial arms. Early examples were mainly for education and makers, such as Dobot Magician and Elephant Robotics' myCobot. After 2024, the open-source SO-100/SO-101 from the Hugging Face LeRobot community, servo-driven and 3D-printed, with a single arm's parts reportedly costing on the order of $100, turned it into a popular entry point into embodied AI: one arm used as a leader, moved by hand, and a follower arm that copies it, is enough to teleoperate and collect demonstration data, which can then train policies such as ACT or SmolVLA. Its precision, stiffness, and payload are all limited, making it suited to algorithm validation rather than industrial work.

ExampleThe SO-101 is assembled from Feetech STS3215 servos and 3D-printed parts; a leader-follower pair is enough to teleoperate and collect data to train an ACT policy.

Also called

Desktop Robotic Arm, Low-cost Robot Arm

Related

SO-100 / SO-101 Arm · LeRobot · Leader-Follower Teleoperation · Elephant Robotics myCobot · Dobot Magician · Open-Source Hardware (OSHW)

Sources

TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100 - GitHub
SO-101 - LeRobot Docs

As of

2025