The reading room
Robotics' End Game
The big picture — where robotics and embodied AI are headed — from NVIDIA's GEAR lead. Start here.
Inside the World's Smartest Robot Brain
A beautifully made primer on how vision-language-action models actually work.
Humanity's Last Machine
A gorgeous, component-level tour of what actually goes into a humanoid robot.
The Hugging Face Robotics Course
Free, hands-on, built by the LeRobot team. The gentlest on-ramp — begin at Unit 0.
Robot Learning: A Tutorial
One page that maps the whole field — data, imitation, policies — in an afternoon.
LeRobot — the library
The open engine our whole stack runs on. Motors, cameras, datasets, training, inference.
Training ACT on the SO-101
A candid, failure-and-all end-to-end walkthrough: setup, teleop, data, and training ACT on our exact arm.
RL to grasp and lift, in MuJoCo
Trains SAC to lift a cube in simulation. The reward table, and the eleven versions it took to get there, are the real lesson. 100% in sim, and he claims nothing about the real arm.
Grasping from pixels
The same task, now from camera images instead of privileged state. This is the step where it starts to resemble what we actually run.
HIL-SERL: real-world grasping from scratch
On hardware, no simulator, human correcting it as it learns. Uses the same HIL-SERL machinery that already ships inside our LeRobot install.
Fine-tuning SmolVLA
Pick-and-place with a vision-language-action model on our arm. Where three months of one person's work lands.
MuJoCo Menagerie — trs_so_arm100
The official MJCF model of our arm. It ships two calibration variants — new-calib zeroes each joint mid-range, old-calib zeroes it fully extended. Pin one and write it down, or simulation and hardware will disagree about what an action means, silently.
lerobot-sim2real
Train with RL in GPU-parallel ManiSkill3, then deploy to a real arm zero-shot. Built to sit on top of LeRobot, so the hardware side is already solved.
Lil'Log
The clearest long-form deep-dives in ML — diffusion, RL, agents, and more.
Yang Song
Score-based diffusion models, from one of the people who introduced them.
Sander Dieleman
Deep, beautifully written essays on diffusion and generative models (DeepMind).
SIGReg, derived from scratch
A rigorous, beautifully built derivation of LeJEPA's anti-collapse regularizer — characteristic functions to a trainable loss.
Diffusion Policy, explained by its author
The method, the intuition, and the honest open questions — straight from the source.
ALOHA & ACT — a walkthrough
Alexander Soare breaks down action chunking and the ALOHA setup, end to end.
VQ-BeT, explained by its authors
Mahi Shafiullah & Seungjae Lee tokenize actions with a residual VQ-VAE — as expressive as diffusion, ~5× faster.
OpenVLA — a walkthrough
Moo Jin Kim, OpenVLA's author, on building an open vision-language-action model.
Train an ACT policy on the SO-101
A practical, start-to-finish walkthrough of training ACT on the SO-101 with LeRobot.
Ilia Larchenko
Deep, practical robotics — SO-101 teleop, training, and reinforcement learning on the arm.
Dan Makes Things
An engineer who actually builds things, SO-101 included. Watch a whole build come together.
Foundation Robotics
Short, sharp explainers on frontier hardware — robotic hands, humanoids, actuators. Good for five spare minutes.
The Robot Brains
Long, generous interviews with the people building robot brains.
Automated
Weekly conversations with robotics and humanoid leaders and founders.
Over the Horizon
Technical, opinionated deep-dives on where the humanoid-robotics industry is going.
Embodied AI 101
Short, current deep-dives on manipulation, teleop, and open-source embodied models.
Essence of Linear Algebra
The visual foundation — vectors, matrices, and what they actually mean. Before any ML.
Generative Diffusion Models
How diffusion models generate — the math under Diffusion Policy and the VLAs.
Modern Robotics
Mechanics, planning, and control — the classical robotics foundation, taught clearly.
Robotic Manipulation
The closest thing to a textbook for what we actually do. Free notes and PDF, runnable Drake notebooks, and chapters on pick-and-place, bin picking, deep perception and tactile sensing. Start here.
Underactuated Robotics
Dynamics and control for real, underactuated robots. Deep, rigorous, and worth it.
ECE 4560 — Intro to Robotics
Ten progressive labs with a MuJoCo homework repo, taught on SO-101 arms. Forward and inverse kinematics, trajectory planning, Lie groups. The nearest thing to a ready-made curriculum for a club with our hardware.
CS 285 — Deep RL
The canonical graduate deep reinforcement learning course. Lectures free online.
CS 224R — Deep RL
Deep RL with a robot-learning bent, from one of the field's leading researchers.
Read something great we missed?
This list is curated, not complete. Members keep it sharp — send a link and a one-line why.