Seeed Studio Releases Their Own Affordable and Open Source Robotic Arm

If you’ve dreamed of having your own robotic arm, the current state of the market can seem both overwhelming and disheartening. The off-the-shelf choices seem to either fall into the “toy” category or the “really expensive industrial equipment” category. The DIY options are pure chaos, with a million choices—few of which have comprehensive documentation or associated software chains. That’s why Seeed Studio is releasing an affordable and open source robotic arm design called the reBot Arm B601.

The reBot Arm B601 is a fully open source design for a six-DoF (Degrees of Freedom) + gripper robotic arm. It targets a sub-$1,000 build budget, but has surprisingly respectable performance specs. It has a maximum reach of 650mm, a payload of at least 1.5kg, and repeatability under 0.2mm.

While that all sounds great, there are open source robotic arm designs out there that have similar specs. What sets this apart is Seeed Studio’s commitment to documentation and software support. They’re rolling that out over time and not everything is available right now, but the timeline has the complete package scheduled to release in March of this year.

That will include a complete BoM (Bill of Materials) with suppliers, assembly instructions and video, 3D models and files, free learning courses, and a whole suite of software integrations. Those integrations are critical for making the reBot Arm B601 usable and Seeed Studio plans to support ROS2, LeRobot, Pinocchio, Isaac Sim, and more with a comprehensive Python SDK.

I think this is a great idea, because Seeed Studio has the resources and motivation to develop a fantastic design, plus all of that supplementary content to go along with it — something that many open source developers neglect, because it is so time consuming to produce.

The GitHub repository for reBot Arm B601 is already public, so you can take a look at that and see what is available now. Seeed Studio should flesh that out over the next couple of months, then will continue development and refinement on an ongoing basis.