Dual-arm Robot

A robot with two arms, able to coordinate them the way a person uses both hands.

A dual-arm robot has two robot arms that can coordinate to complete a task together, whether mounted as a fixed tabletop platform or attached to a mobile base or humanoid torso. Many everyday tasks can't be done with one hand, such as folding laundry, unscrewing a bottle cap, or holding something steady while inserting a part; this kind of bimanual manipulation requires the two arms to coordinate in time and space, doubling the action space, and is a major challenge in imitation learning and VLA research. Early examples include Rethink Robotics' Baxter and ABB's YuMi; the most common platform in embodied-AI research today is Stanford's ALOHA, which uses two pairs of low-cost leader-follower arms for teleoperation, along with its derivative, AgileX's Cobot Magic. Models such as RDT-1B and π0 are trained on large amounts of this kind of bimanual data.

ExampleMobile ALOHA mounts an ALOHA bimanual setup on a mobile base, and with only about 50 demonstrations per task, learns tasks such as stir-frying shrimp.

Also called

Bimanual Robot

Related

Bimanual Manipulation · ALOHA · Mobile ALOHA · AgileX Cobot Magic · ABB YuMi · Rethink Robotics Baxter

Sources

ALOHA: A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation
Mobile ALOHA