The hardware is done
DUM-E combines three subsystems that are now built and working together: a mobile drivebase, a vertical lift, and a six-degree-of-freedom arm. The arm is my Robot Arm v7. It rides a stepper-driven carriage on an aluminium mast, so the same arm can work near the floor or at desk height.
How it thinks
DUM-E takes long-horizon text commands. An LLM + pointer + SLAM planner breaks each task into smaller steps and drives the base directly, then a VLA model takes over for precise control of the arm.
Onboard compute is a Raspberry Pi 4 inside the white base. It runs the ROS 2 master, and an ESP32 bridges it to the motors. The arm already runs a SmolVLA policy trained on around 30 episodes, and the software stack is where development is focused now.