Robotics and Automation Services
Automating Repetitive Physical Tasks
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For small manufacturers, labs, warehouses, and workshops, low-cost robot arms, including open-source designs, can now be programmed, or taught by demonstration with AI, to do repetitive physical tasks.
Example tasks include sorting, picking and placing, packing, kitting, and simple assembly. Lab and sample handling is another kind of task in scope.
Our Service and Assessment
The service starts by assessing whether a task suits a robot arm.
Whether a task suits a low-cost arm depends on the weight it must lift, how precisely it must repeat a position, and whether it has to run unattended for a full shift.
The arm is then set up, programmed or trained, and kept running.
Software and Training by Demonstration
Taught by demonstration means a person moves the arm through the task while cameras record it, and a model learns to repeat the task from those recordings, instead of each movement being hand-coded.
We use Hugging Face's LeRobot, an open-source Python library for controlling robot arms, recording demonstrations and training the models that run them.
LeRobot's workflow is to teleoperate the arm, record demonstrations as video plus motion data, train a policy on them, then run the policy on the arm.
LeRobot supports several kinds of trained policy, from ACT, its recommended starting point, to larger vision-language-action models such as SmolVLA and pi0.
Robot Arm Hardware
LeRobot's flagship arm is the SO-101, a low-cost design whose parts are 3D printed and whose six joints use Feetech STS3215 serial-bus servos.
The SO-101 is used as a pair: a leader arm a person moves by hand and a follower arm that copies it, which is how demonstrations are recorded.
Other arms that work with LeRobot include the Koch v1.1.
Safety and Compliance
An arm working near people needs a risk assessment of where it can reach and how it is stopped before it is put to work.
OSHA has no standard written specifically for robots; it points to ANSI/RIA R15.06, the US adoption of the ISO 10218 industrial robot safety standard.
ISO/TS 15066 is the technical specification for robots that work alongside people, adopted in the US as RIA TR R15.606.
OSHA's lockout/tagout rules apply when a robot is serviced or maintained.