By following these steps, you'll be able to replicate tasks, such as picking up a Lego block and placing it in a bin with a high success rate, as shown in the video below.
During data collection, you’ll use a “teloperation” device, such as a leader arm or keyboard to teleoperate the robot and record its motion trajectories.
Once you’ve gathered enough trajectories, you’ll train a neural network to imitate these trajectories and deploy the trained model so your robot can perform the task autonomously.
Note that the `id` associated with a robot is used to store the calibration file. It's important to use the same `id` when teleoperating, recording, and evaluating when using the same setup.
With `rerun`, you can teleoperate again while simultaneously visualizing the camera feeds and joint positions. In this example, we’re using the Koch arm.
We use the Hugging Face hub features for uploading your dataset. If you haven't previously used the Hub, make sure you can login via the cli using a write-access token, this token can be generated from the [Hugging Face settings](https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens).
Now you can record a dataset. To record 5 episodes and upload your dataset to the hub, adapt the code below for your robot and execute the command or API example.
Locally, your dataset is stored in this folder: `~/.cache/huggingface/lerobot/{repo-id}`. At the end of data recording, your dataset will be uploaded on your Hugging Face page (e.g. https://huggingface.co/datasets/cadene/so101_test) that you can obtain by running:
Your dataset will be automatically tagged with `LeRobot` for the community to find it easily, and you can also add custom tags (in this case `tutorial` for example).
You can look for other LeRobot datasets on the hub by searching for `LeRobot` [tags](https://huggingface.co/datasets?other=LeRobot).
#### Record function
The `record` function provides a suite of tools for capturing and managing data during robot operation:
Control the data recording flow using keyboard shortcuts:
- Press **Right Arrow (`→`)**: Early stop the current episode or reset time and move to the next.
- Press **Left Arrow (`←`)**: Cancel the current episode and re-record it.
- Press **Escape (`ESC`)**: Immediately stop the session, encode videos, and upload the dataset.
#### Tips for gathering data
Once you're comfortable with data recording, you can create a larger dataset for training. A good starting task is grasping an object at different locations and placing it in a bin. We suggest recording at least 50 episodes, with 10 episodes per location. Keep the cameras fixed and maintain consistent grasping behavior throughout the recordings. Also make sure the object you are manipulating is visible on the camera's. A good rule of thumb is you should be able to do the task yourself by only looking at the camera images.
In the following sections, you’ll train your neural network. After achieving reliable grasping performance, you can start introducing more variations during data collection, such as additional grasp locations, different grasping techniques, and altering camera positions.
Avoid adding too much variation too quickly, as it may hinder your results.
If you want to dive deeper into this important topic, you can check out the [blog post](https://huggingface.co/blog/lerobot-datasets#what-makes-a-good-dataset) we wrote on what makes a good dataset.
- On Linux, if the left and right arrow keys and escape key don't have any effect during data recording, make sure you've set the `$DISPLAY` environment variable. See [pynput limitations](https://pynput.readthedocs.io/en/latest/limitations.html#linux).
## Visualize a dataset
If you uploaded your dataset to the hub with `--control.push_to_hub=true`, you can [visualize your dataset online](https://huggingface.co/spaces/lerobot/visualize_dataset) by copy pasting your repo id given by:
A useful feature is the `replay` function, which allows you to replay any episode that you've recorded or episodes from any dataset out there. This function helps you test the repeatability of your robot's actions and assess transferability across robots of the same model.
Your robot should replicate movements similar to those you recorded. For example, check out [this video](https://x.com/RemiCadene/status/1793654950905680090) where we use `replay` on a Aloha robot from [Trossen Robotics](https://www.trossenrobotics.com).
To train a policy to control your robot, use the [`python -m lerobot.scripts.train`](../src/lerobot/scripts/train.py) script. A few arguments are required. Here is an example command:
2. We provided the policy with `policy.type=act`. This loads configurations from [`configuration_act.py`](../src/lerobot/policies/act/configuration_act.py). Importantly, this policy will automatically adapt to the number of motor states, motor actions and cameras of your robot (e.g. `laptop` and `phone`) which have been saved in your dataset.
4. We provided `policy.device=cuda` since we are training on a Nvidia GPU, but you could use `policy.device=mps` to train on Apple silicon.
5. We provided `wandb.enable=true` to use [Weights and Biases](https://docs.wandb.ai/quickstart) for visualizing training plots. This is optional but if you use it, make sure you are logged in by running `wandb login`.
Training should take several hours. You will find checkpoints in `outputs/train/act_so101_test/checkpoints`.
To resume training from a checkpoint, below is an example command to resume from `last` checkpoint of the `act_so101_test` policy:
If you do not want to push your model to the hub after training use `--policy.push_to_hub=false`.
Additionally you can provide extra `tags` or specify a `license` for your model or make the model repo `private` by adding this: `--policy.private=true --policy.tags=\[ppo,rl\] --policy.license=mit`
If your local computer doesn't have a powerful GPU you could utilize Google Collab to train your model by following the [ACT training notebook](./notebooks#training-act).
You can use the `record` script from [`lerobot/record.py`](https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot/blob/main/lerobot/record.py) with a policy checkpoint as input, to run inference and evaluate your policy. For instance, run this command or API example to run inference and record 10 evaluation episodes:
As you can see, it's almost the same command as previously used to record your training dataset. Two things changed:
1. There is an additional `--control.policy.path` argument which indicates the path to your policy checkpoint with (e.g. `outputs/train/eval_act_so101_test/checkpoints/last/pretrained_model`). You can also use the model repository if you uploaded a model checkpoint to the hub (e.g. `${HF_USER}/act_so101_test`).
2. The name of dataset begins by `eval` to reflect that you are running inference (e.g. `${HF_USER}/eval_act_so101_test`).
