Ready to spend a weekend turning Melbourne into a mini-robotics lab? Join MLAI’s relaxed, pizza-fuelled local hub for Hugging Face’s LeRobot Worldwide Hackathon and help push the “ChatGPT moment for robotics” a little closer. Two days, a stack of open-source robot arms, and €15 k worth of gear up for grabs—let’s build, train & demo some bots!

What’s LeRobot?

LeRobot is Hugging Face’s open-source toolbox that bundles state-of-the-art imitation- and reinforcement-learning pipelines, datasets and pretrained policies in vanilla PyTorch, all aimed squarely at real-world, low-cost robots.
The headline reference bot is the SO-101 3-D-printed arm—cheap servos, printable parts, and a calibration script that “just works” with the library.

Key Details (quick-glance)

🔎 What	😊 Where/When
Kick-off	Sat 14 Jun 2025 — 09:00 AM AEST (We'll start building and prep for the HuggingFace opening stream from HQ, Sat 5pm) (Hugging Face)
Hacking window	Immediately after kick-off through Sun 15 Jun — wrap at 06:00 PM AEST
Venue	Uni Melb Arts West Building (Room PAR-148A-L4-453) — 60 seats, fast Wi-Fi, loads of power
Provided	6× SO-101 arms, high-speed internet, snacks, chill tunes
Bring	Laptop (Linux or Mac M-series preferred; CUDA-ready GPU ideal) • optional own robot • any sensors/cameras you fancy
Team size	Up to 5 humans per squad (solo OK)
Registration	Affordable ticket via this Humanitix page + global Hugging Face form (Hugging Face)

What to Expect

Saturday – Setup & Build

Unbox / print / bolt together your arm (some demo arms provided), or spin up the simulator.
Follow beginner-friendly walkthroughs on imitation learning & RL (video + notebooks). YouTube
Meet mentors on site for Linux/Git/PyTorch/servo-tuning SOS.
Opening stream from HuggingFace HQ at 5pm.

Sunday – Final Sprint

Work with your team on your own time and venue to finalise submissions!
18:00 sharp: submissions freeze—upload done, high-five your arm.

Prizes & Glory

A €15 000 hardware treasure-chest (robot arms, sensors, controllers, tooling) awaits. Judges shortlist the top 20 demos; the community then votes the top 10 in Discord, and the three crowd favourites split the loot. No cash swap—expect shiny new robot parts shipped to your door!

Who Should Roll Up?

Total beginners eager to try their first RL policy—we’ll pair you with code-along mentors.
Hardware tinkerers itching to show off custom grippers or funky camera rigs.
ML obsessives chasing a weekend project with real-world impact.

If you can write a bit of Python and love solving problems in a caffeine-powered haze, you’ll fit right in. Beginners welcome!

How to Prepare

Register at HuggingFace (Hugging Face) → join the global Discord
Clone github.com/huggingface/lerobot and run the quick-start script.
(Optional) Print or order SO-101 parts before 17 May if you want your own rig.
Skim the legal policy so you know the ground rules.

Grab Your Spot

Space is capped at 50 attendees—first-in, first-served. Smash that Register button, dust off your soldering iron (or just your VS Code), and let’s teach some arms new tricks together. See you on 14 June! 🦾🎉