Built to Be Hacked: Why Research Robots Have to Stay Open
A research robot has to support experiments its designers haven't thought of yet.
That's the starting point of a short video Alloy Robotics made with our founder, Matt Trossen. It's also one of the hardest engineering calls in robotics. When you design a robot for research, you have to decide which parts to lock down and which to leave open for whatever the next team wants to try.
Everything changes every six months
Matt has been building robots for more than 20 years, and he’s watched the pace pick up. (Peter Okiokpa covers that history in his profile of Trossen.) In his words: “Every six months, the products have completely evolved. There’s new tech that’s come out, there’s new code, there’s new models, and it needs to move fast.”
No two research teams need exactly the same robot, either. One team wants a different sensor. Another needs new grippers or a different arm. Someone else wants to alter a servo or change an arm length. As Matt puts it, everyone has slightly different needs, so they all need to hack the system a little bit.
So we build it to be changed
That's why we design our arms to be modified, so teams can make changes without starting over:
Swap the hardware around the arm: add a sensor, change the grippers, adjust the setup for the task.
Use the software you already work in: our systems connect to ROS, MuJoCo, NVIDIA Isaac and Hugging Face's LeRobot, and our data collection SDK is open source.
Keep it running: wear parts are field-replaceable, and every product comes with lifetime support.
The goal is a robot that keeps up with the research instead of holding it back. Matt's own summary is short: it's built to be "the easiest to use."
Built for the experiment you haven't planned yet
The next model, sensor or task is already on its way. The hardware under it should be ready for that.
Meet the 2026 hardware lineup
Every product in our new lineup is built on the same idea: open hardware, shared software, and parts you can swap yourself.
WidowX Arm Series Our new family of 6-DoF arms. The controller and touchscreen are built into the base, the connectors are industrial M12, and the cables are designed to be replaced in minutes. All three arms run the same software, so your code moves with you when you change arms. Core and Pro reach 700 mm. Heavy reaches 1.5 m with an 8 kg peak payload.
Glide and Cockpit Glide is our leader arm for teleoperation. It has passive encoder joints with zero felt stiction, so your demonstrations record the motion you intended without servo jitter. The handle has a joystick and programmable buttons. Cockpit is the mobile operator stand that holds one or two Glides.
Two WidowX arms on one portable plate. The arm spacing and camera position are fixed, so every session starts from the same setup. You can pair any two WidowX arms, including mixed pairs, and clamp the plate to any stable surface.
A dual-arm mobile manipulator for indoor work. It has swerve drive, a vertical lift, and a swappable battery that lasts a full day. Easy-access panels and open mounting points let you add and change things as your research changes.
Our open-source C++/Python framework records synchronized arm and camera data and exports it straight to LeRobot. It works across the whole lineup.
Thanks to Alloy Robotics for the conversation with Matt.
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