Building a robotics research setup that lives next to a desk

Adafruit Blog reports that Matthias Plappert at dfdx labs is pursuing independent robotics research focused on manipulation, doing the work entirely in the open. Rather than aiming for academic papers or a major open-source release, the emphasis is on the research log itself—documenting what works, what fails, and lessons learned along the way. His setup is compact enough for a desk: an industrial robot arm, two cameras, and teleoperation controlled by custom Python software running on a consumer laptop—which is, by design, a soft real-time system.

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