Le Robot Worldwide hackathon this weekend
A quick note on the global hackathon.
Hugging Face, which has been making many investments in robotics this year such as the release of the robotic arm SO-ARM101, is organizing a worldwide robotics hackathon this weekend (June 14/15). The purpose of the hackathon is mainly to build a community around the SO-ARM101 (and related robots like LeKiwi) by getting folks to build robots, enhance hardware, create datasets, or train the arm to do new tasks by either imitation learning or reinforcement learning. I am impressed by the investments Hugging Face has made for this hackathon, and the scale at which the hackathon has been organized… robot ehuthusiasts working side by side on a global scale is truly unprecedented.
This post is mainly to make you aware of the various resources in case you wish to follow the hackathon. Note that some of the links might get outdated after the hackathon, kindly ping me if you find a link broken. Here are the relevant resources.
Hackathon Challenges: The challenges that HuggingFace described for the hackathon are listed here. The challenges are mainly around: 1) Imitation Learning, where you use a leader-follower example to train the robotic arm. 2) Reinforcement Learning, where you train a robot to accomplish tasks by giving it human feedback in the form of correcting mistakes, 3) Making hardware improvements to the SO-ARM101 and related robots , and 4) Improving the data gathering pipeline. The document above is also very rich with a lot of references and experts who you could contact (most of the experts are on X).
X Feed: Much of the cool work being done at the Hackathon is circulating on X, just search for “LeRobot hackathon”. My favorites are: a robotic arm making tea, playing ice hockey, and folding clothes.
Check out official submissions at the Le Robot hackathon portal.
Join the discord channel. While the discord is mainly to coordinate organization activities for now, the top 30 demoes will be up for community voting on June 16. I am really looking forward to see all the cool videos that people create.
Lastly, as Clement (the CEO of Hugging Face) suggests, if you are near a hackathon location (You can find all the hackathon venues across different continents at the Discord channel), do try to visit tomorrow, even if it is for a few minutes. This is a historic moment for robotics and perhaps the future is being made right now. I will be visiting the Hackathon at Mountain View, CA, and hope to post some pictures from there tomorrow.
Also, if you participated in the hackathon, and would like to write about your experience, please DM me below.