Getting the SO-101 Robot Arm Up and Running

While I no longer work for an AI robotics company (after more than five years at Waymo, Cruise, and 1X), edge inference and embedded compute are still very close to my heart, and from time to time I play with them in my hobby projects. In all that time working in AI robotics, my work rarely involved producing the control signals that make a robot move in physical space. So I decided to buy an SO-101 robotic arm and play with code, models, and approaches that can manipulate real objects. The first step was getting the arm up and running. Almost every AI robotics engineer has probably experienced the same thing: getting through the initial setup and installing all the dependencies takes a significant amount of time. The SO-101 was not an exception. In this post, I want to share my experience setting it up with a Jetson Orin Nano. NVIDIA Jetson & reComputerBefore getting into the Jetson setup, I want to clarify what comes with the arm. When you buy the SO-101 kit, you get a leader arm…