Hugging Face launches Grabette to let anyone train robots for under €500
Instead of buying a million-dollar lab setup to train AI hardware, open-source devs just built a DIY gripper that turns hand movements into robot training data. Roboticists might actually get to sleep tonight.
The engineering team at Pollen Robotics, operating under AI powerhouse Hugging Face, dropped the hardware blueprints for Grabette, a hand-held recording device that captures object manipulation in real time. Instead of programming precise spatial coordinates by hand, a user grips the device, performs an everyday physical task, and lets onboard sensors turn that movement into a machine-learning dataset.
The device packs a dual-camera setup, using a wide-angle lens to mirror the robot’s visual perspective while an RGB-D camera tracks 3D color, spatial depth, and positional trajectory. Magnetic encoders monitor exact finger pinching forces while internal measurement units keep telemetry perfectly in sync, saving human control engineers from writing math equations for simple wrist flips.
Once recorded, selected action clips get uploaded directly to the Hugging Face Hub and converted into the standardized LeRobot dataset format. To replay those learned actions on actual hardware, the team designed Gripette, a motorized twin equipped with two servo motors that mounts directly onto arbitrary robotic arms because positional data is saved in six degrees of freedom.
Building the recording grabber costs roughly 500 euros in parts, while the motorized replay grabber runs an extra 120 euros. The build relies heavily on standard Raspberry Pi single-board computers, Raspberry Pi camera modules, OAK-D depth sensors, and 3D-printed plastic frames, with all CAD files and code published under the open-source Apache License license. The team is already working on Casquette, a head-mounted camera rig designed for first-person action recording.
Robotics development has officially shifted from corporate mega-labs to garage builders printing custom claws over the weekend. The tech industry will soon find out if cheap open-source data can finally make household chores automated before humanoid startups burn through their next venture round.
Source: Hugging Face
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