SmolVLA
Compact, efficient VLA built for consumer hardware
This is the 'small but capable' version of the robot brain models. It runs on a normal gaming PC GPU — no data center required. Perfect for hobbyists, students, and anyone building their first robot.
If you have a modern laptop or gaming PC, you can run this today. Hugging Face provides excellent documentation and the LeRobot library makes it plug-and-play.
A 450M parameter Vision-Language-Action model from Hugging Face. Trained on the LeRobot dataset, designed for cost-effective deployment on consumer-grade GPUs.
LeRobot dataset (multi-task manipulation demonstrations)
Teach a low-cost robot arm to sort objects
Run on-device on a Raspberry Pi 5 setup
Prototype new tasks without heavy compute
Anyone with a computer can run this
RELATED DISCUSSIONS
Community →Seeded and planned prompts — not live forum activity yet.
- Community signalIntermediate / AdvancedHow should EAR track open robotics models?
Meta-discussion on ontology, benchmarks, and graph links for open-weight VLAs and manipulation models.
- Community signalIntermediate / AdvancedOpenVLA in the field — what breaks first?
Open Models room prompt linked to openvla-7b — inference, fine-tuning, and sim-to-real gaps. Seeded prompt only.
Related Models
VIEW ALL →LeRobot ACT
Action Chunking Transformer for bimanual manipulation
Diffusion Policy
Visuomotor policy learning via conditional diffusion
OpenVLA
State-of-the-art open-source VLA for robot manipulation