348 Jack Vial - Koch Screwdriver Robot Demo
Hello LeRobot team!
I’m excited to share my Hackathon submission: new robot and teleoperator integrations for the Koch screwdriver hardware I designed for the Koch robot. You can find the PR (which includes all software changes) here: https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/pull/1303. The STL files, OpenSCAD source, and bill of materials for the hardware are available at https://github.com/jackvial/koch_robotic_arm_screwdriver.
For the software integration, the main difference is that the screwdriver’s gripper motor operates in velocity (wheel) mode, and the teleoperator maps gripper position to motor velocity. With these integrations, I recorded a 20-episode dataset of screwing into a thread checker and unscrewing back out again. This simple test task doesn’t require any reset time—unless you make a mistake when teleoperating, which I did plenty of times! You can explore the dataset here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/jackvial/koch_screwdriver_thread_checker_06_e20.
In the demo video:
- First part: A close-up of the screwdriver robot being teleoperated on the thread checker task.
- Second part: Operation of the teleoperator. It’s the standard Koch gripper, but closing the gripper maps to clockwise rotation of the screwdriver, opening maps to counter-clockwise, and the neutral gripper position stops the screwdriver. You can use the gripper like a throttle—how far you open or close it controls the speed of the screwdriver.
The hardware is very affordable:
- Neodymium magnets to hold the bit: $5–$10
- Arm-mounted camera: $53
- Precision screwdriver bits (most people already have these; the set I used was about $60)
The design is quick and easy to print and assemble. I plan to refine it further and provide instructional videos.
Roadmap for the screwdriver project:
- Engage the community and invite contributions
- Design a screwdriver attachment for the SO101 arm (a great starter hardware project)
- Create a 3D-printable, affordable test bed for evaluating the screwdriver robot
- Add robot and teleoperator integrations for the SO101
- Collect larger datasets for more complex tasks
- Fine-tune SmolVLA on the screwdriver task, ideally using the SO101 arm
- Explore bimanual tasks: one arm holds the screwdriver, the other uses a fine-tip gripper for small screws
- Design an accessible assembly task involving multiple screw-together parts
In the long term, I’d love to build a self-replicating, self-assembling robot. While fully self-replicating robots are ambitious, self-assembling designs seem more achievable in the near term. I’m particularly interested in low-cost self-assembling and self-replicating robots for environmental applications—such as harvesting ocean plastic or preventing the spread of wildfires.
Huge thanks to the LeRobot and Hugging Face teams for hosting this competition and for creating such an excellent library and community!
Re uploading my video as mp4
