Videos
35 short-form videos covering OpenLoco end-to-end — what it is, why it exists, the catalog, and the underlying robotics stack. ~50 minutes of content, snackable in 60–110 second pieces.
What is OpenLoco?
The hero video — what the project is and does, in 90 seconds.
Robotics in 90 seconds
Three flagship explainers. Top-of-funnel, designed for sharing.
What is a robot, actually?
The sense-plan-act loop. The body-brain-senses triad.
Why is robotics hard?
The integration tax. Seven disciplines that don’t talk to each other.
What’s open in robotics today?
The free + open reference material — textbooks, simulators, hardware, courses. See the Learn page for the full index.
The Whole Stack
13 chapters — one per layer of robotics. Mechanism through morphology playbooks. ~17 minutes total if watched straight through.
Ch. 1 — Mechanism
Links, joints, kinematic chains. Why morphology decisions cascade downstream.
Ch. 2 — Actuators
DC, BLDC, FOC, gear reduction. Tier 0 / Tier 1 / Tier 2.
Ch. 3 — Power + Electronics
Battery chemistry, voltage rails, communication buses.
Ch. 4 — Kinematics + Dynamics
FK, IK, Jacobians, the manipulator equation.
Ch. 5 — Control
PID → impedance → MPC → whole-body control.
Ch. 6 — Planning
Sampling-based vs. search-based vs. trajectory optimization.
Ch. 7 — Perception
Sensors, fusion, SLAM, foundation models as perception modules.
Ch. 8 — State Estimation
EKF / UKF / particle filters. Sensor fusion into one workable belief.
Ch. 9 — Simulation
MuJoCo, Drake, Brax, Isaac. The sim-to-real gap.
Ch. 10 — RL + learning-based control
When to use RL, when not. Reward shaping. Common failure modes.
Ch. 11 — Software architecture
ROS 2 vs. custom. Real-time vs. best-effort. Embedded vs. host.
Ch. 12 — Integration
Calibration, manufacturing tolerance, the deployment gap.
Ch. 13 — Morphology playbooks
Quadruped / biped / manipulator / drone / hybrid: standard stack per type.
Meet the 16
One short per descriptor in the catalog. ~50 seconds each.
Stanford Pupper
Hobbyist BLDC quadruped, ~0.4 kg.
Solo 12
ODR research-grade brushless quadruped, ~2.5 kg.
Mini Pupper
Mangdang’s mass-produced consumer kit, ~0.7 kg.
MIT Mini Cheetah
Dynamic-locomotion benchmark, ~9 kg.
Boston Dynamics Spot
Public URDF, ~32 kg. Closed system, partly opened.
ANYmal-WL
Wheel-leg hybrid quadruped. Walking and driving modes.
ANYmal-WL Autonomous
Same chassis plus RGBD perception and skill graph.
M4 Morphobot
Caltech air-ground hybrid. Walks, drives, flies.
M4 Autonomous
Same chassis plus VLM mode-selection.
Mini-Whegs
3-spoke wheg appendages. Cockroach-style emergent gait.
Mini-Whegs Autonomous
Same chassis plus obstacle-height perception.
Upkie
Wheeled biped. LQR-balanced. First non-quadruped in the catalog.
SO-100
LeRobot’s $110 6-DoF arm. Most-installed open arm.
ALOHA
Stanford bimanual rig. Twin Trossen ViperX 300, 14 DoF.
Reachy 2
Pollen humanoid upper body. Head + neck + 2 × 7-DoF arms.
Crazyflie
Bitcraze nano quadcopter, ~27 g. First pure aerial in the catalog.
Descriptor → running robot
Two process demos showing what the OpenLoco pipeline actually does.
From descriptor to running robot
Edit JSON, recompile, watch URDF reload, MJCF spin up in MuJoCo, controller track.
Morphology matters
Same descriptor schema, swap the body — and behavior changes completely.
Production notes
- Voice: ElevenLabs George (warm storyteller, voice-locked across the openIE family).
- Backgrounds: BFL Flux 2 Pro — workshop / engineering bench aesthetic, amber on charcoal.
- Animations: Manim (community v0.20). Diagrammatic overlays for descriptor structure, fan-out emit, control loops, morphology grids.
- Compositing: ffmpeg — Ken Burns slow zoom on stills, Manim alpha-blended at 88% opacity, narration-locked durations.
- Total runtime: ~50 minutes across 35 videos.