ALOHA

ALOHA is a set of robot arms built at Stanford. It has two manipulator arms like human arms, and it's teleoperated by having a person move a similarly shaped smaller set of arms nearby, which the robot then mirrors. The blueprints and parts list are fully open, so anyone can assemble a similar robot and run experiments with it.

Think of ALOHA as the 'neighborhood gym equipment' of robotics. Labs that can't afford expensive specialized gym machines (commercial robot systems) can still try the same training programs using this cheap, standardized equipment. Because of this, it's become common practice for teams developing new robot control methods to first run them on ALOHA to check performance.

That said, ALOHA itself isn't an AI model — it's a hardware body made of arms and joints. The 'brain' that drives that body is a separate control model, and ALOHA is essentially the stage where you test whether that brain actually works well in practice.

As described in the article: "The first testbed was ALOHA, an open-source dual-arm robot built by Stanford, teleoperated using two smaller manipulator arms." The key point here is that ALOHA isn't the name of an AI model — it's the robot hardware used to validate control models trained in simulation. In other words, it should be read as "the model was tested on ALOHA," not "ALOHA learned something."