SO-101 (LeRobot / TheRobotStudio)

What it's for

The SO-101 is an open project from Hugging Face and TheRobotStudio. One arm is guided by the operator's hand and the other repeats its movements; from the collected recordings a model can be trained so that the arm performs the task on its own.

It is a pair of arms, leader and follower, each with 6 degrees of freedom (“Degrees of Freedom (DOF) in Humanoid Robots”), built from 3D-printed parts and Feetech STS3215 servos. Control runs through an external computer with a GPU connected over USB, and the software for imitation learning comes from the LeRobot framework. The main applications are imitation learning, teleoperation and low-cost robotics courses.

It works best at a university (universities) and in a laboratory (laboratories): it lets you show students how modern control methods work, described in “VLA Models: How AI Controls Humanoid Robots in 2026”, without spending thousands on a branded arm. It also suits a hobbyist's home workshop, but not factory work: the payload and reliability of such a design are not described in the sources, and the manufacturer does not claim any safety certification.

Who it's for

Best suited to: students and machine learning researchers, science clubs, people running robotics courses, and hobbyists with basic electronics knowledge. The open bill of materials and the absence of license fees make it an almost cost-free entry platform.

A poor fit: schools that want a ready-made kit without assembly, since the robot has to be built, calibrated and connected to a computer. Do not buy it for production or for tasks involving payload either, because it is not an industrial robot. Availability in Poland is not described in the sources; you have to import parts yourself.

See “How to Start Learning Robotics in Poland” and “Educational Robots for Schools and Universities”.

Deployments

The sources say it is a popular choice for universities and for robotics and machine learning courses; that describes a role, not a list of specific institutions.

If you want to see what similar arms look like at larger scale, look at the Trossen AI Stationary or the overview educational robots.

The Trossen AI Stationary is the successor to ALOHA: a bimanual kit for imitation learning with a laptop and ROS 2, more professional, with pricing on request. The myCobot 280 (about PLN 2,516 (≈ EUR 575), 250 g payload) is ready to use but less open for model learning. The Dobot Magician is a four-axis desktop arm (0.5 kg payload) for programming, available in Polish shops. The Kinova Gen3 Lite is a six-axis version for education and light manipulation, but its price and full data are unconfirmed. If you are looking for a kit for children, the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime Set is a closed ecosystem, and one that has been retired from sale.

We have no confirmed launch date for the SO-101 and know of no events for this model, so we do not guess at a timeline. What we do know is that the project is based on the TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100 repository on GitHub and on LeRobot's documentation; the repository name itself suggests the SO-101 belongs to an evolving SO-ARM series of arms, but that is an inference from the name, not confirmed history of the generations.

Context on the maker: Hugging Face, founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York, has an associated robotics company, Pollen Robotics. If you are interested in where teaching robots by imitation is heading, read “VLA Models: How AI Controls Humanoid Robots in 2026”.