Koch v1.1 Teleop Arm

Koch v1.1 is a low-cost, open-source 6-DOF 3D-printed robot arm pair engineered for imitation-learning research. A lightweight leader arm acts as the human interface; a stronger follower arm replicates the motion in the real world. Both limbs are printed from PLA/PLA+ on a consumer FDM printer, snap together without special tooling, and are driven by Dynamixel XL-series servos (XL430 for high-torque joints, XL330 for the wrist). A single Waveshare USB-C servo bus board streams commands from any laptop or SBC, so the whole rig can be built and controlled for ≈ $600 in parts. The project ships with out of the box with HuggingFace’s LeRobot framework: record kinesthetic demonstrations, store them in a public dataset, and train vision-based policies with a few CLI commands. Because trajectories are saved in the standard LeRobot format, they can be shared on the HuggingFace Hub and re-used by the community—turning every build into a potential data contribution. Creator Jess Moss publishes the CAD, BOM, and firmware under the permissive MIT license, encouraging remixing and redistribution. The design is intentionally modular: joints are identical mirrored segments, servo horns are printable, and the gripper can be swapped for a low-cost vacuum cup or a custom end-effector. If you want an entry point into real-world imitation learning that you can build in a weekend and expand indefinitely, Koch v1.1 is it.