Ep#71: Build Your Own Robot

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Apr 8, 2026

Guest

Enes Erciyes

Enes Erciyes, hardware and control contributor to YOR. Manan Anjaria, researcher who helped design the low-cost mobile manipulator. Mahi Shafiullah, robotics researcher focused on mobile manipulation and deployments. They discuss building an affordable, modular open-source mobile manipulator. Topics include gripper design, compliant whole-body control, cost-saving hacks, modularity, SLAM/navigation, and community-driven extensions.

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INSIGHT

Open Hardware Lowers The Cost Of Research

Open-source modular hardware radically lowers research friction for mobile manipulation.
YOR provides a 10k USD template of off-the-shelf arms, an omni base, a tabletop lift and custom grippers so teams can fix, swap, and iterate quickly.

ADVICE

Design For Fast Replaceable Failures

Design intentional, easy-to-replace failure points so repairs are fast and damage is minimized.
YOR breaks mainly at the gripper coupling and can be swapped in an hour or two to keep experiments running.

INSIGHT

Make Arms Compliant To Let The World Guide Motion

Low-stiffness joint control lets commodity arms perform contact-rich household tasks.
Enes implemented gravity compensation and lower gains so the arm uses whole-arm motion instead of overstressing a single joint when opening fridges or doors.

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Robots, unfortunately, tend to be expensive. And finding a robot that’s both capable of performing a wide variety of mobile manipulation tasks, and is affordable and “hackable”, is extremely difficult. Many different problems need to be addressed, from arm control to navigation to integrating your data collection strategy into hardware design. This can make it difficult for all but the most well-funded teams to “scale” real-world robotics research.

Fortunately, the team behind Build Your Own Robot has a solution. Manan Anjaria, Mahi Shafiullah, Jeff Cui, and Enes Erciyes joined us to talk about how they build a fully open-source mobile manipulator out of off-the-shelf parts, which has humanlike range of motion, and can perform a wide variety of tasks, all while being only roughly $10,000 to build.

Watch Episode 71 of RoboPapers, with Michael Cho and Chris Paxton, today to learn more!

Abstract

Recent advances in robot learning have generated significant interest in capable platforms that may eventually approach human-level competence. This interest, combined with the commoditization of actuators, has propelled growth in low-cost robotic platforms. However, the optimal form factor for mobile manipulation, especially on a budget, remains an open question. We introduce YOR, an open-source, low-cost mobile manipulator that integrates an omnidirectional base, a telescopic vertical lift, and two arms with grippers to achieve whole-body mobility and manipulation. Our design emphasizes modularity, ease of assembly using off-the-shelf components, and affordability, with a bill-of-materials cost under 10,000 USD. We demonstrate YOR's capability by completing tasks that require coordinated whole-body control, bimanual manipulation, and autonomous navigation. Overall, YOR offers competitive functionality for mobile manipulation research at a fraction of the cost of existing platforms. Project website: this https URL

Learn More

Project Page: https://yourownrobot.ai/

ArXiV: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11150

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