MEVION: Low-Cost Open-Source Data Collection System for Powerful and High-Speed Dual-Arm Manipulation

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

The global competition for developing robotic foundation models is intensifying. Among the data collection systems used for dual-arm robots, ALOHA is representative of being low-cost and open-source, and is widely adopted by researchers as a de facto standard. However, due to its limited ability to generate high forces and speeds, it is difficult to handle heavy objects or perform fast manipulations. To address this, we developed MEVION, a low-cost and open-source dual-arm robot data collection system capable of generating greater force and speed. All parts of this robot can be sourced through e-commerce, and by extensively utilizing sheet metal welding, its large body structure is constructed with a small number of components at low cost, while also simplifying assembly. MEVION is equipped with four 6-DoF arms with parallel grippers. Each arm weighs 7.0 kg and has a maximum torque of 60 Nm, and the entire system can be constructed for about USD 14,000. The elbow joint adopts a closed-link mechanism similar to those used in quadruped robots, which reduces the distal mass and enables higher force and speed output at the end-effector. We demonstrate that MEVION enables data collection for object manipulation tasks not previously possible and supports imitation learning-based motion generation. All hardware and software of this work are included in the Supplementary Materials or https://github.com/haraduka/mevion.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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