Be the Robot! — Kids Drive Real AI Robot Arms
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
September 25th-27th
What if a kid could not just see a robot, but be one — and then teach it?
Our booth features four SO-101 robot arms — the $100, 3D-printed, open-source arms from the Hugging Face LeRobot project that have sparked a worldwide hobbyist robotics movement. Visitors get two hands-on experiences:
Station 1 — You're the Robot! Kids grab a "leader" arm and a twin "follower" arm copies their every move in real time. They'll use it to play pick-and-place games: stack blocks, sort colors, and hand off prizes — and feel first-hand how hard (and fun!) robot manipulation really is.
Station 2 — Watch It Learn. The same teleoperation is how modern robots are actually taught. We show an arm running a neural network policy trained by imitation learning — from demonstrations recorded exactly the way kids just did at Station 1 — autonomously doing a kid-designed task. Throughout the day we record new demonstrations with visitors and show how their examples become training data.
Everything is open source and built at home: 3D-printed frames, hobby servos, a webcam, and a laptop. Our goal is to show families that real AI robotics is no longer locked in labs — a curious kid with a printer and $100 can start teaching robots today. We'll share the full build recipe, printable parts, and links so visitors can make their own.
Weibo Cheng
I'm weibo, a Bay Area maker and parent building low-cost open-source robot arms at home with a 3D printer. I believe hands-on AI robotics should be accessible to every curious kid, and Maker Faire is exactly where that spark happens.
