Pollen Robotics released Grabette, an open-source handheld gripper designed to capture robot manipulation data, according to an announcement published on Hugging Face. The system allows operators to record tasks using a handheld device and turn them automatically into datasets for robot learning.
Data collection for robot learning traditionally requires operating a physical robot arm, presenting hardware and logistical hurdles. Grabette bypasses the need for a robot during capture by using a human operator equipped with an instrumented handheld gripper, cameras, and trajectory tracking tools.
The handheld Grabette unit carries a bill-of-materials cost of approximately 490 euros. It combines two cameras: a wide fisheye camera providing context-rich wrist views and an off-the-shelf OAK-D RGBD depth camera for 6-degree-of-freedom tracking. The assembly incorporates a Raspberry Pi, a standard Pi camera, magnetic encoders, and an inertial measurement unit. Data streams from sensors and encoders record simultaneously using a single shared clock.
To execute learned movements on physical or simulated robots, Pollen Robotics designed Gripette as a motorized twin gripper. Gripette features a camera and two servomotors with a bill-of-materials cost of roughly 120 euros. Demonstrations store camera-local Cartesian poses and gripper states, outputting standardized LeRobot datasets hosted on the Hugging Face Hub.
Processing and Reference Implementation
Users process recorded episodes through a browser dashboard without installing local software. The pipeline uploads raw data to Hugging Face, where the grabette-slam space executes visual simultaneous localization and mapping using the RTAB-MAP library. The system verifies trajectory continuity before creating a formatted dataset.
Pollen Robotics published a reference workflow using 200 demonstrations to train a Diffusion Policy on a single consumer GPU. The training configuration uses a ResNet18 encoder with SpatialSoftmax and DDIM scheduling to predict 6-dimensional rotation actions. Testing was conducted on an OpenArm 7-degree-of-freedom arm fitted with the Gripette gripper over a gRPC connection.
The hardware CAD files, Raspberry Pi capture software, and processing pipelines are available under open-source licenses. Pollen Robotics also confirmed ongoing work on Casquette, a head-mounted point-of-view device for egocentric video capture. Following the release, the team made its electronic design repository public on GitHub after early users identified access limits.
