GRABETTE

Open-source toolkit for collecting robotic manipulation demonstrations and turning them into training-ready datasets.

A GRABETTE rig records synchronized camera + depth streams (+ IMU with the OAK-D SR) from hand-held or gripper-mounted devices, recovers camera trajectories with SLAM, and exports LeRobot datasets for policy learning. The data-collection pipeline is robot-agnostic.

🔩 Build the hardware: Bill of Materials · CAD — Onshape · Assembly guides: Grabette · Gripette

grabette_readme_demo.mp4

Components

packages/ — the devices (what runs on the Raspberry Pi images)

Package	Role	Target	Interface
grabette	Hand held data-collection device	Raspberry Pi	HTTP/WebSocket, :8000
gripette	Robot mounted Gripper motor	Raspberry Pi Zero 2W	gRPC, :50051
casquette (WIP)	POV head-mounted device	Raspberry Pi Zero 2W	HTTP/WebSocket, :8001

Related repositories

Repository	Role
grabette-slam	Raw recordings → SLAM → LeRobot dataset: the grabette-postprocess package and the Hugging Face Space that runs it
grabette-policy	Policy learning: Diffusion Policy and π0.5 training, action representations (grasp projection, chunk-relative), diagnostics, and the OpenArm + Gripette robot (model, sim, real driver, teleop bridge)
grabette-os	The grabetteos / gripetteos Raspberry Pi images

Using GRABETTE with a different robot arm: the devices carry no OpenArm dependency. The OpenArm integration in grabette-policy is the reference example for adding another platform.

Cloning

The repo uses Git LFS for mesh assets (*.stl, see .gitattributes). Install LFS once per workstation, then clone normally:

sudo apt install git-lfs             # Debian / Ubuntu / Pi OS — install the binary first
                                     # (macOS: brew install git-lfs; see git-lfs.com for others)
git lfs install                      # one-time per user — configures git filters
git clone git@github.com:pollen-robotics/grabette.git

If you cloned before git lfs install, the .stl files are 130-byte pointer text files. Fetch the real binaries:

cd grabette
git lfs pull

Verify:

file packages/grabette/urdf/grabette_right/assets/*.stl | head -3
# expected: "Binary"   |   bad: "ASCII text" (pointer file → run `git lfs pull`)

For on-device installs where you don't need the meshes (Pi services don't load them), skip LFS to save disk + bandwidth:

GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone git@github.com:pollen-robotics/grabette.git

Development

Requires uv. Python ≥ 3.11.

uv sync --all-packages          # full workspace dev environment
uv run --package grabette python packages/grabette/main.py   # run a service (mock backend by default)

The one rule to know: this repo is a single uv workspace — one shared .venv and one uv.lock at the root. A bare uv sync, run from the repo root, builds the whole workspace and installs every package's dependencies. Therefore:

• Single package / deployment → uv sync --package <name> (extras attach to it: uv sync --package grabette --extra rpi).
• Full dev environment → uv sync --all-packages.

On-device install (Raspberry Pi): the simplest path is to flash the prebuilt grabetteos / gripetteos image from the latest grabette-os release, which has everything below baked in. For a manual install, each device package ships a make install-rpi target that builds the --system-site-packages venv picamera2 needs (a bare uv sync skips it and the service falls back to the mock backend). Follow the package's own README for the exact steps: grabette, gripette, casquette (WIP).

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.