Project: SO-ARM101 x Isaac Sim x Isaac Lab (Tutorial Series)

I’m starting a this new project to provide a new tutorial series on my channel YouTube LycheeAI, focused on learning NVIDIA’s robotics simulation tools — Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab — using the SO-ARM101 robot (newer version of SO-ARM100).

The SO-ARM is an affordable, open-source dual-arm robot developed by TheRobotStudio. It includes both a leader and a follower arm, making it ideal for learning bimanual manipulation. Together with LeRobot, an open robotics library by Hugging Face, it helps make robotics and AI more accessible to everyone.

🚀 Project Goal

The main goal of this series is to achieve Sim2Real integration: for example connecting the physical SO-ARM robot to simulated environments in Isaac Sim via ROS 2 and deploying trained reinforcement learning policies from Isaac Lab to the real world!

But beyond that, we aim to explore the full potential of NVIDIA Isaac GR00T — a SOTA research platform designed to develop general-purpose robot foundation models using imitation learning and massive synthetic data pipelines. Built on Omniverse and Cosmos, GR00T enables scalable training and real-world deployment of intelligent robots.

With Isaac GR00T, we will:

Teleoperate the real SO-ARM to collect realistic synthetic demonstrations,
Use GR00T-Mimic and Cosmos to generate large-scale synthetic motion data,
Train and fine-tune the GR00T N1 foundation model in Isaac Lab,
Deploy the learned behaviors back onto the real SO-ARM.

🤖 Don’t Have a SO-ARM? → Get one with a Discount: `LYCHEEAI5` !

There are official vendors who sell all required parts and already assembled kits such as WowRobo from where I bought mine. I was very happy with the low cost, the quick delivery and also the awesome support from the founder himself, Leo Xiao, so I naturally asked for a collaboration and now I’m excited to announce that WowRobo is sponsoring this project. They also provide my community with a 5% discount!

So you can get your own SO-ARM101 (or SO-ARM100) here using code LYCHEEAI5:

WowRobo Robotics WowRobo Robotics Store

Make sure to “Add to cart” or choose “More payment options” in order to use the Discount Code!

🙏 Thank You

I couldn’t have started this project on my own, so I want to thank everyone in my community, NVIDIA, and all the amazing individuals, companies and communities who offer their time, help, and resources. Make sure to check out all the other communities below. I’ll also make sure to share everything I use and discover here on the platform, so others can follow along or build on it.

Since we’ll be mainly focusing on the simulation part at the beginning, you don’t need a physical robot to participate. If you’d like to contribute and help creating these tutorials, feel free to reach out and join my dedicated Discord server for the project. And if you simply want to follow the progress and learn together, join our weekly study sessions every Wednesday at 21:30 CET on the official NVIDIA Omniverse Discord server.

Let’s build the future of open robotics together!