Start Your Robotics Journey at SVRC
Whether you are an undergraduate exploring robotics for the first time, a graduate researcher collecting manipulation data, or a maker building your first robot arm, SVRC provides the hardware, learning paths, and community to get you from curiosity to capability.
Choose how you want to engage with robotics
Every student comes to robotics with different goals. SVRC supports four distinct paths, and you can move between them as your interests evolve.
Learn: Robotics Academy
Structured learning paths from first principles through advanced robot learning. Start with SO-101 arm basics: power on, calibrate joints, run teleoperation, and collect your first demonstration dataset. Progress through ROS2, camera integration, data formats, and imitation learning. Each module builds on the previous one, with hands-on exercises using real hardware.
Open Academy →Build: Hardware Access
Get your hands on real robot hardware. SVRC offers student pricing on the SO-101 tabletop arm, OpenArm kits, and the DK1 bimanual teleoperation system. If buying is not in your budget, our Mountain View facility has hardware available for supervised use. Build logs, assembly guides, and troubleshooting support are available through the forum and documentation wiki.
Browse hardware →Contribute: Open Source
SVRC's hardware designs, SDK, and data tools are open source. Contributing code, documentation, bug reports, or dataset annotations is one of the fastest ways to build real robotics experience and a public portfolio. Start with the OpenArm firmware repository or the LeRobot data conversion tools. Every contribution, no matter how small, is reviewed and credited.
Community & repos →Research: Collaborate with Labs
Graduate students and research teams at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, and other institutions use SVRC hardware and data services for their research. If your lab needs manipulation data, hardware for experiments, or a data collection facility, SVRC can provide it. We also host visiting researchers at our Mountain View facility for short-term data collection campaigns.
Research articles →Tangible benefits for students
Student pricing on hardware
Verified students receive discounted pricing on SVRC hardware kits, including the SO-101 starter arm and OpenArm platforms. Email contact@roboticscenter.ai with your university email and student ID for pricing details. Group orders for robotics clubs and course labs receive additional volume discounts.
Forum access and community support
The SVRC Forum is where students, researchers, and professionals discuss hardware builds, software issues, data collection strategies, and robot learning techniques. Post your build logs, ask debugging questions, and search existing threads before you get stuck. Many common student problems, from calibration drift to rosbag synchronization to policy training failures, are already documented with solutions.
Complete documentation
Every SVRC hardware product has full documentation: assembly guides, firmware setup, ROS2 integration, camera calibration, and data collection workflows. The OpenArm documentation is the most comprehensive open-source robot arm reference available, covering mechanical assembly through imitation learning training.
Learning paths with real progression
The Robotics Academy provides structured learning paths, not a scattered collection of tutorials. The student path runs from SO-101 basics through OpenArm, teleoperation interfaces, data collection best practices, and imitation learning. Each stage includes specific milestones so you know when you are ready to advance.
How students use SVRC
PhD students at Stanford and Berkeley use SVRC hardware for their manipulation research, collecting demonstrations on OpenArm and ViperX systems for imitation learning papers. Undergraduate robotics clubs at universities across the US and Asia use SO-101 kits as their introduction to robot control and data collection. Capstone teams use SVRC's documentation and forum to accelerate their final-year projects, building working robot demonstrations in a single semester. And individual makers use our open-source designs to build custom robot arms for personal projects, contributing improvements back to the community.
The common thread is that SVRC provides the hardware access and structured knowledge that eliminates the months of trial-and-error that typically delay student robotics projects. Instead of spending your first semester figuring out which arm to buy, how to set up ROS2, and where to find working example code, you start with a tested hardware platform, complete documentation, and a community that has already solved the problems you are about to encounter.
Start here
Robotics Academy
Structured learning paths for students, from first robot bringup through imitation learning.
Open Academy →ML for Robotics Beginners
If you are coming from a software background with no robotics experience, start here for the fundamentals.
Read guide →OpenArm Documentation
Complete documentation for the OpenArm platform: assembly, firmware, ROS2 integration, and data collection.
OpenArm docs →Community Forum
Ask questions, share build logs, and find answers to common problems from the SVRC community.
Join Forum →