Drive

Before your robot can learn a task, you have to perform it yourself. Driving the arm by hand is the physical skill every later step is built on.

The SO-101 drives via teleoperation: you move the leader arm, and the follower arm copies your motion in real time. The Hackathon Starter Kit includes teleop controls for the SO-101 and recording tools using Rerun.¹

With the Starter Kit installed, from the repo root run:

pixi run learn

That command serves the kit's course site at http://localhost:3000 — a web app the Starter Kit runs on your own machine, because it talks directly to the arms and cameras plugged into it. This page is where you set up your hardware, calibrating both arms and verifying teleop, using the site's embedded viewer.

What you'll do on the Set up page

The site walks you through the station in order, one tool at a time in a shared viewer.

1. Start the data server — driving is how you'll record, and this one process is what holds your episodes when you do. The site needs it up before anything else; start it once and leave it running.
2. Ping the arms — stream live telemetry so you can confirm the machine sees both arms.
3. Calibrate — the leader first, then the follower. For each arm, the site has you hold it in a reference pose, then move every joint end to end of its travel, so the software learns where each joint's center and limits are. The result is saved to disk.
4. Verify teleop — the follower mirrors the leader; this is the motion recording will capture.

The site shows the exact prompts, the poses to match, the embedded views. Follow it there; don't retype anything here.

What calibration does

Calibration maps the joint angles and other robot intrinsics² for both the leader and the follower, so they can be compared evenly to the intrinsics the AI model was trained on. Different SO-101s, while the same model of robot, may have slightly (or sometimes very) different values. Calibration sets the baseline, telling the model how to read the training data.³

your driving becomes data. The next chapter records it, one episode at a time — still on the kit's local site.