"As someone who'd never used robots before, being able to control one and see it mirrored in real time was extremely exciting. I got full teleoperation running in an afternoon — with a single command."

On her first day interning at Lavoro, Reya got a pair of YAM arms from I2RT Robotics running with RIO in ~3 hours, starting from zero robotics experience. She extended RIO to support custom hardware, debugged CAN bus issues on a Linux VM, and ended the session picking up a toy bunny with the follower arm.

"With RIO's flexibility, we got both Gello and Franka-to-Franka teleoperation running for our robot writer project with ease, so we could focus on data acquisition and research instead of porting packages to our system. For Franka-related tasks, we believe RIO may be the only option moving forward!"

The original Franka Emika Panda reached end-of-life in 2023, which left the team fighting dependency issues getting its teleoperation running on Ubuntu 22.04. RIO let them stand up both Gello and Franka-to-Franka teleoperation without reworking their environment, clearing the path to collect data for their robot writing project.

"RIO was a genuine relief. It brought all of it into one place, so we can run any model on our SO-101 without having to mess with too many dependencies. Swapping policies takes just a parameter tweak, intuitive even for LeRobot users, drastically accelerating demo collection and experiments."

The team runs a range of VLA models on their SO-101 arm through RIO, swapping policies with a single parameter tweak instead of the usual dependency wrangling. Familiar to anyone who has used LeRobot, it has sped up their demo collection and experiments considerably.