Every VLA starts with someone teleoperating a robot. In this free, hands-on course, you'll drive a real SO-101 arm by hand, capture motions by demonstration, and trigger them with hand gestures, all with no code.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies learn from demonstration data, and demonstration data comes from a person driving a robot by hand. This free, self-paced course has you do that step yourself, on a real robot arm.
Using an SO-101 leader/follower rig, you'll teleoperate one arm with the other, capture motions by demonstration, and add hand gesture recognition from a webcam. Then you'll wire it all into the sense, think, act loop that almost every robot runs on. It's all configured in the Viam app, with no code to write.
By the end, you'll be able to:
Bring a two-arm SO-101 leader/follower rig online in Viam, from USB discovery to a working machine
Drive the follower arm by hand and see it mirrored in the 3D scene
Record arm and gripper motion as named sessions and play them back
Recognize hand gestures from a webcam with computer vision
Trigger recorded motions from gestures so the arm acts on what it sees
When you finish, you won't just have watched a robot move. You'll have a working robot on your desk that responds to your hand.
Build it by hand or with an AI agent
There's no code to write in this course, since you'll configure everything yourself in the Viam app. If you'd rather hand that part off, each exercise page also includes a prompt you can give to an AI agent to do the configuration for you.
The agent connects to your machine through the Viam MCP server and uses your Viam account to set up and configure the robot, check logs, and move the arms. It asks before anything moves. The physical work stays yours: setting up the hardware, starting viam-server, demonstrating each motion, making the gestures, and checking that the result is right.
With an agent, you get to a working robot faster and see how an agent builds one through Viam. By hand, you learn to build it yourself. Doing an exercise both ways shows you how the robot is set up underneath, whether it's configured by clicking through the app or by an agent.
See what people are saying about Viam courses
“Viam 101 is a good introductory course for people who can code and want to get started with robotic manipulation. It helped me understand how to think about robotic arms and ended with a working palletizing robot.”
Ashwani R.
Software Engineering Master Student
“This course showed what Viam can do in an easy to understand way. It was straight to the point, clear, concise, and interactive. Now I understand how to control robots over cloud.”
Park
Software Engineer & Founder
"It is a great course to see how the sim to real gap is being addressed and how amazing this space is going to be in the future.”
Ujjwal
Data scientist
“The course takes users through the basic principles of the Viam development environment and how Viam interacts with hardware. The course also clarifies how the hierarchy of components is used within systems.”
Dan P.
CTO
What you'll need
An SO-ARM101 kit: a leader arm, a follower arm, a mountable webcam, power supplies, and USB cables. The SO-ARM101 is open source. You can build it yourself by following TheRobotStudio's repository, or buy a pre-assembled kit from Seeed Studio (recommended) or Hiwonder. Assembled kits run about $300.
A computer running macOS on Apple Silicon, Linux on x86_64, or Windows.
Linux terminal basics: You know how to use a command line interface.
Comfort reading JSON: Viam uses JSON to configure your components and connections. You don't need to write it from scratch, but you should be comfortable reading and editing config files.
Course outline
1. OVERVIEW
2. Configure the first arm
3. Configure the second arm
4. Place the arms in the 3D scene
5. Add the webcam
6. What teleoperation is
7. Teleoperate the follower
8. Capturing motion by demonstration
9. Save a home pose
10. Record and replay motions
11. What a vision service does
12. Recognise gestures
13. React to gestures
14. Recap
Instructor
Jiwon Shin
Jiwon Shin is a Staff Technical Content Engineer on the Education team at Viam. She is an educator and creative coder passionate about making technology more accessible and engaging. Prior to joining Viam, she was the Domain Manager for Programming, AI, and Data at Codecademy. She also taught at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, teaching creative coding with p5.js and Arduino, as well as computer vision.
Viam Education
Viam Education is a free, developer-first program designed to help engineers learn robotics and build on the Viam platform. Viam Education brings together a series of free online courses, live events, hackathons, and NYC office hours to make building robotics applications more accessible than ever. Viam 101 is available now; upcoming courses include software engineering for robotics, motion planning, computer vision, and more. Join the Viam Discord for updates on events, courses, and more.
