iHR 2026: Building a VLA Evaluation Platform at KUPAC

Overview On 19 September 2026, I gave a talk titled KUPACにおけるVLA検証基盤の構築 (Building a VLA Evaluation Platform at KUPAC) at the 15th Intelligent Home Robotics Workshop (iHR), held at Soka University. The talk followed our work at KUPAC to build an affordable platform for the complete robot learning cycle: collecting demonstrations, training policies, deploying them on a real robot, and using the results to improve the system. Building the platform ILOHA hardware. Our custom dual arm robot combines Robstride QDD motors near the base with Dynamixel motors near the end effectors. Each arm has six joints and a gripper; the setup costs approximately JPY 500,000. MR teleoperation. Meta Quest 3 controllers act as virtual leader arms. Inverse kinematics converts their poses into joint commands, reducing the cost and space needed for physical leader arms. A PC centered pipeline. Quest 3 handles input and inverse kinematics, while the PC manages robot control and data recording. WebSocket carries control commands and UDP carries joint angle updates. LeRobot integration. Camera images and joint states are recorded as LeRobot datasets, connecting demonstration collection, policy training, and deployment through a shared robot interface. From pick and place to cloth folding We first validated the pipeline by training ACT to move snacks into a box, then tackled folding a 30 cm square handkerchief twice with X VLA . We collected approximately 307 demonstrations , varying the initial cloth placement, background, and lighting. After visually assessing demonstration quality, we used 200 high q…