From KUKA determinism to VLA models: a builder's tour of robot arms, MuJoCo and sim2real
chrisalbon · x · 2026-10-03
andrewmccalip shares a long-form rabbit-hole report on robot arms: his last exposure was the era of ABB RobotStudio, KUKA and fully deterministic machines with Faro laser trackers and no vision in the loop. Returning via vision-language-action models and learned policies felt wild. He maps how hardware, training pipelines, MuJoCo and sim2real fit together, lists six projects he now wants to build, and demos a very hacky vision integration into JEV that worked great. chrisalbon quips: "it's strings all the way down."
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