NYU's open-source MABEL robot has 56 DOF, dexterous hands and an $8,056 parts list
An NYU-led team has open-sourced MABEL, a wheeled robot with two 7-DOF arms, two 17-DOF ORCA hands, a pitching torso, a lift and a 3-DOF neck: 56 degrees of freedom in all. The cheapest build's parts cost $8,056, per the arXiv paper posted November 2, which the lead author completed at the University of Toronto.
Source: Humanoids Daily
Design files, firmware, ROS 2 software and simulation models are openly licensed. An Apple Vision Pro's head and hand tracking drives the whole robot. An ACT policy trained on 38 minutes of demonstrations picked and placed an object in 8 of 10 trials.
Why it matters
MABEL lowers the cost of a two-armed mobile robot with dexterous hands for labs that want to collect their own training data. The learning test is small: demonstrations kept the base and lift near their starting positions, so it checks the pipeline, not mobile manipulation. No assembled-robot price has been published.
Sources
New to robots? Read our guide: How to tell if a robot video is real: CGI, sped up, or teleoperated?.
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