The finished setup in action: setting up a chessboard via teleoperation. Visible are the different camera feeds, the human operator, and the sensed robot state; the operator can switch between cameras. Robotics research has become cheap and accessible enough that small teams, and even individuals, can now do meaningful research on real hardware. There are two reasons for this. First, capable robot hardware has become dramatically more affordable: the physical setup below uses an industrial-grade arm, two cameras, and a full teleoperation setup while staying below €5,000. 1 1 This figure excludes VAT and the cost of compute. Second, there is now a steady supply of publicly available foundation models that are suitable for robotics. Hugging Face’s LeRobot , for example, is built around the same idea of democratizing state-of-the-art robotics research. I have some history with this. Between 2017 and 2020, I did robotic manipulation research at OpenAI, first on a humanoid hand and then on a tabletop .…