THG News · Research
Stanford Releases Mobile ALOHA 2 — Sub-$20K Bimanual Mobile Manipulator
Stanford's IRIS lab released Mobile ALOHA 2 on June 14, the second generation of its widely used open-source bimanual mobile manipulator. The complete platform — chassis, arms, compute, and teleoperation rig — comes in under $20,000 in parts cost.
What's New
- Improved 7-DoF arms with 5 kg payload (up from 1.5 kg)
- Integrated Jetson Orin AGX onboard compute
- Native LeRobot and ROS 2 Iron support
- New "co-pilot" mode that blends human teleop with autonomous policy execution
- All CAD, BOM, firmware, and demonstration-dataset hosted on Hugging Face
Why It Matters
Mobile ALOHA 1 became one of the most-replicated research platforms of the last 18 months, with over 200 university groups building their own. Mobile ALOHA 2 widens that footprint by lowering cost and improving payload-class generalization. Lead author Tony Z. Zhao calls it "a complete, hackable robotics development kit for the LLM era."